We’ve had to dramatically shift how we talk about UK politics.

by Joanie Willett and Arianna Giovannini

Our book, An Introduction to UK Politics; Place, Pluralism and Identities, seeks to update how we analyse politics. Politics is full of narratives and analytical tools that we’ve used for decades. Sometimes when we find that old models no longer work as we imagine that they used to, we spend years talking about it, keeping alive analytical structures that we should have buried long ago. Traditional political cleavages in voting patterns are a good example of this. We have been talking about how they no longer work since at least as far back as when Joanie was an undergrad, more than 20 years ago.

5 or 6 years later when we first started teaching UK politics, political analysts ‘knew’ that politics changes incrementally. Big things might happen, but they evolve little bit by little bit. Political shifts were signalled well in advance, and you knew that unless one of the Big Two parties were looking pretty feisty in the previous election, then it was unlikely that they’d be able to make the kind of gentle voter ‘swing’ required to overturn the government and win the election.

Following this logic, part of the reason why many followers of Labour held their heads in their hands in despair following the 2019 general election, was because the scale of the Conservative victory, together with the spectacular collapse of the Labour Red Wall, looked as if it would lock in a Tory government for another generation. People genuinely asked what the future was for the Labour Party. For Labour supporters, this felt especially bleak with the seemingly supreme dominance of the SNP in Scotland, where the party needed votes if it was to get back into government.

But perhaps one of the political knowledges that we collectively should have kept hold of, but keep forgetting, is that a week is a long time in politics. The things that have happened in the four and a half years between the last election and now have dramatically shifted the political landscape of the UK, to the extent where (at the time of writing), the debate is not if the Conservatives will lose, but how devastating will that loss be. This has happened because politics in the UK forgot something else important. That national institutions are put in place by the general public. The wider population who are creating and shaping political discourses as part of their everyday lives.

Whilst we keep hold of familiar analytical narratives, and ‘knowledges’ about our politics, we have missed a deeper understanding about what is going on in people’s everyday lives.

This means that we forget what politics in the UK is for, and instead focus on a distant and remote Westminster bubble, and vague discussions about who you’d like best as Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak or Kier Starmer.

Whether we lay the ‘blame’ for the seismic shifts of the past few years in over-centralisation, weak local government, regional inequalities, a lack of ability to shape the things that matter to us, or a feeling that culturally we are not represented by national political discussions (or a combination of all of the above), the politics of discontent in the UK is real and (as we saw in the vote for Brexit), impactful.

We know that as people get more disenfranchised by contemporary politics, the algorithms of social media and political debates gets pushed further to the extremes.

Over the course of the election so far politicians have given us policy proposals to reduce inequalities, increase regional devolution, and address various parts of the culture wars issues. However, potential voters are still given a narrative framing that looks at the question of who to vote for through the lens of ‘Rishi or Kier for PM’.

Not only does this marginalise our smaller parties, who often win a vote share that is not reflected in electoral seats, it also massively overlooks what could be the strength of our first past the post system. People get to vote for the person who they feel will best represent them in their localities, in Parliament. Of course, it might be nice if your MP is also the party in power, but that does not necessarily mean that they will be more or less influential. The key question is about how much you trust your MP to represent constituency interests in Parliament, and how good you feel that they’ll be in the art of doing politics to Get Things Done.

What does this matter in political debate? Well, for the most part, it roundly alienates people even further. It forgets that whatever happens in Westminster is actually led by ordinary people like you and me, in our towns, villages, and cities throughout the UK. And it forgets that a plural UK politics would ensure that these voices are heard and listened to.

In our book, we showcase that no large political shift has ever happened before without coming from a groundswell of popular opinion amongst civil society, pushed by campaign groups large and small, raising awareness about topics as varied as housing, water pollution, refugees, the NHS, and civil liberties. Often support for UK-wide campaigns comes from the experiences that each of us have in their communities.

In other words, the ability of your local MP to raise the visibility of matters that you care about is perhaps more important than what political party they represent.

Perhaps one way of creating more stability in UK politics would be to refocus attention on local issues and local questions, right the way from Westminster politics down to a community level. Government needs to remember that, borrowing from Abraham Lincoln, it (should be) of the people, for the people, by the people and that our political institutions only exist because of the activism attitudes and beliefs held by, in and amongst, civil society.

An Introduction to UK Politics is a novel and progressive textbook from Sage. Edited by Joanie Willett and Arianna Giovannini, it brings together leading researchers in the field and offers a complete picture of UK politics. Its pluralistic approach and emphasis on the politics of the everyday illustrate the many ways everyone in the UK influences British politics and emphasize the value of critical and traditional approaches.

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Book Details
An Introduction to UK Politics: Place, Pluralism, and Identities
Joanie Willet, Arianna Giovanni
May 2024
ISBN: 9781529602890

About the Authors

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Joanie Willett is an associate professor at Exeter University and her research focusses on the entangled relationship between people, how they organise into communities, and the landscape that they are situated in (geography, geology, and ecology). She uses the New Materialisms to explore the politics and economics of entanglement, and the implications of a more-than-human politics on social and environmental justice.

Her Fulbright All Disciplines scholarship (ethnographic inspired) fieldwork explores what an entangled politics looks like, drawing on case studies in Appalachia, New Orleans, and California.

She has contributed to a number of Parliamentary Inquiries, including for the House of Lords Select Committee on the Rural Economy and reports for the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee. She has been invited to present her research internationally in both policy and academic settings, including the European Union Committee of the Regions, The European Parliament, the University of California Berkeley, Feile Belfast, and the Ministry for Housing, Communities, and Local Government, and many more.

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Arianna Giovannini is Professor of Political Sociology in the Department of Economics, Society and Politics (DESP) at the University of Urbino, Italy. Before joining DESP in December 2023, Arianna was Associate Professor/Reader in local politics and public policy and the director of the Local Governance Research Centre (LGRC) at the Department of Politics, People and Place, at De Montfort University. Previously she has served as director of IPPR North, the leading think tank for the North of England, on a secondment basis from DMU.

Arianna’s work focuses on the politics, governance and political economy of the north of England; ‘levelling up’ and regional inequalities; devolution, multi-level governance and constitutional change in the UK; and the changing landscape of local government, especially in the context of austerity and Brexit. She has written extensively on these topics, and her book ‘Developing England’s North. The Political Economy of the Northern Powerhouse’ (with Craig Berry) was published by Palgrave in 2019. Her upcoming book An Introduction to UK Politics (with Joanie Willett) is due to be published this March.

Her work actively engages with the world of policy and practice. Most recently, she was on the executive of APSE’s Local Government Commission 2030 – and independent inquiry into the future of local government in the UK. Arianna also regularly comments in the media on devolution, local government, constitutional change and European politics.