CAMBRIDGE – In her by-election victory speech, the U.K. Green Party’s newly elected MP, Hannah Spencer, highlighted the link between economic insecurity and political discontent in the United Kingdom and around the world. Work, she observed, no longer provides the stability it once did. People work hard but cannot put food on the table, buy their children school uniforms, turn on their heating, or live off the pension they worked for.
The hardships Spencer described align closely with the indicators of financial insecurity I have studied for more than a decade. Taken together, they underscore the central role of economic strain in fueling the rise of both right- and left-wing populism across Europe.
Crucially, Spencer’s remarks did not refer only to extreme hardship. She also pointed to more ordinary, yet deeply felt, forms of financial insecurity, such as being unable “to dream about ever having a holiday.” No longer confined to the poorest households, these pressures are increasingly common among Europe’s middle class.
Nearly a decade after Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump’s first election victory, political discontent is still often portrayed as the terrain of a loud, angry minority – the “left behind” who are supposedly the major force behind recent political upheavals. But the very poor and marginalized are notoriously detached from politics and are among the least likely to vote.
Instead, as I argue in my recent book "Insecurity Politics," today’s electoral shifts reflect ordinary forms of insecurity affecting a broad segment of the population. The sources of insecurity include heavier workloads, constant pressure at work, and the inability to cover unexpected expenses or build savings.
One of the most prominent figures promoting the argument that “left behind” voters are driving political change is, ironically, far-right activist and Reform UK candidate Matthew Goodwin, who lost to Spencer in the Gorton and Denton by-election. As an academic, Goodwin has authored several influential studies over the past decade, including a widely cited analysis of Brexit arguing that Britain’s “Leave” vote was primarily a revolt by working-class voters.
While Goodwin’s interpretation has received extensive coverage in the British press, alternative analyses have gotten far less attention. For example, a 2017 study I co-authored showing that Brexit was closely linked to economic insecurity among middle-class voters was widely covered abroad but largely overlooked in the U.K.
At the time, it was both common and politically convenient to portray financial hardship as confined to the working class and the very poor. Since then, however, it has become abundantly clear that much of the British middle class is no longer secure or comfortably well off. Still, the reality of the U.K.’s economic decline is largely absent from public debates, perhaps because it challenges a key source of national pride.
It is far easier to portray those who vote outside the Conservative-Labour duopoly as marginalized or alienated than to confront what their choices reveal about the failures of the U.K.’s economic model. While Gorton and Denton is a particularly deprived constituency, Spencer’s victory has resonated far beyond it, because her message speaks to widespread and deeply rooted insecurities that mainstream political parties rarely acknowledge.
Spencer’s election caught many by surprise, given that the Green Party had previously held only one other seat in Parliament. But it was also unexpected for another reason: her proposed policies, in theory, should not appeal to the “left behind” communities described by Goodwin. In his account, these voters are primarily motivated by cultural conservatism and anti-migration sentiment. Many mainstream politicians, including large parts of the Labour Party, have similarly interpreted political resentment as a reaction to mass immigration rather than as a response to growing insecurity and the narratives that have shaped voters’ understanding of it.
Source: Korea Times News
