Kostas Maronitis

The election of Liz Truss to the leadership of the Conservative party and to UK Prime Minister in conjunction with the appointment of Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor of the Exchequer on the 5th of September 2022 signalled an ideological break with Boris Johnson’s short-lived government. However, financial markets reacted unfavourably if not violently to a framework of fiscal policy that lacked foundations and long-term planning. The sharp fall of the pound and rise of interest rates not only derailed the government’s plan and led to the resignations of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor but more importantly forced a swift change to something oddly familiar – austerity and the explicit acknowledgment that financial markets constitute an extra-parliamentary force that determines the viability of a government and its subsequent policy direction. By focusing on the ‘growth plan’ presented to the House of Commons on the 9th of September 2022, the Chancellor’s statement presented to the House of Commons on the 17th of October 2022 and on Britannia Unchained, the multi-authored book by Kwasi Kwarteng, Liz Truss et al. (2012) as the ideological and intellectual foundation of the short lived and rejected ‘growth plan and by deploying Wolfgang Streeck’s concept of the ‘consolidation state’ the paper raises the following questions: First, to what extent can a neoliberal economy serve the interests of the markets and the citizens? Second, is it possible for a government to be sovereign while operating withing the network of rating agencies, financial markets and international financial institutions?

The victory of the conservative party New Democracy with an absolute majority in the 2019 Greek general elections was met with enthusiasm from the international political and financial media. The newly elected administration was depicted as technocratic with a natural aversion to populist politics, capable of putting an end to the political and cultural tensions between the EU core and periphery, fiscal consolidation and social welfare.
The enthusiasm expressed by the international political and financial media and the way such an enthusiasm has been framed by the alleged virtues of liberalism, technocracy, moderation and capitalist acumen, paint a distorted picture of a conservative administration whose electoral victory and governing style depend on the ideological support of the far right.
This paper analyses the international politics and financial media’s depiction of the Greek conservative ruling party from 2019 up until 2021 by focusing on Foreign Policy, the Economist and the Financial Times.
Conservative centrism and the free market have become increasingly unable to project a coherent vision of a good life to which all social groups and classes could subscribe. Consequently, conservative politics and its affiliate media found necessarily to distance themselves from old ideologies and identities, and to attempt to move to a new politics free from traditional principles. Technopopulism (Bickerton and Invernizzi Acceti, 2022) suggests that governance should be exercised by experts who have not been tainted by party and parliamentary politics and whose policymaking approach is independent from established ideologies. Effectively and as the international political and financial media argue, policymaking needs to be redefined as a problem-solving activity that bypasses social divisions associated with parliamentary democracy. As a newly found populism restores unity under the banner of nationalism and xenophobia, technocracy allows to take over and solve people’s problems.   
The aim of this paper is twofold: First, the paper establishes the relationship between technocracy and populism, the mainstream right and far right through the depiction of Greek politics and of the ruling party New Democracy by the Economist, the Financial Times and Foreign Policy. Second, drawing on the work of Chamayou (2021) and Dardot and Laval (2019), the paper examines the international political and financial media’s reconsideration of the acceptable limits of far-right politics and the ideological repositioning of the Greek mainstream right via the concepts of liberal authoritarianism and post-neoliberalism.

The paper examines the emergence of the “Red Wall” as a descriptive term deployed in explanations of Labour’s electoral collapse and of the Conservative’s new direction as the party of those who have been left behind by free mobility of labour and de-industrialisation. While there is a growing body of literature that examines the continuous adaptability of the Conservatives to electoral challenges as well as to social, cultural, and economic anxieties via the concepts of statecraft and of the de-alignment of the British electorate there is little as to how the construction of a new collective identity – that of the “Red Wall”, has reinforced the hegemony of the Conservative party. The paper makes three different yet interconnected arguments. First, the Conservative campaign and governing needs to be contextualised within the debate on the recognition of identity and re-distribution of wealth. Second, the “Red Wall” does not pre-exist political campaigns and respective policies but instead is constructed and communicated in order to solidify a new conservative hegemony. Third, the “Red Wall” is part of a political-communicative tactic of constructing collective identities based on cultural stereotypes, location and professional occupation in line with Margaret Thatcher’s Essex Man and Tony Blair’s Mondeo Man for indicating ideological shifts and electoral trends.

The paper focuses on the Pick for Britain public appeal (spring 2020) that aimed at encouraging young people, as well as furloughed and laid-off workers to take up seasonal employment in UK farms in order to ensure the sustainability of supply chains. The paper argues that the failure of the campaign is a result of three distinct, yet interrelated discourses: i) increasingly restrictive migration policies, ii) lack of investment in the automation of agricultural production, and iii) a growing sense of entitlement on the part of the British public that abundant and inexpensive produce should be available all-year-round. The paper brings these discussions together theoretically - by drawing on the work of Foucault, Polanyi, Dardot and Laval, and Isin, and empirically within the contextual intersection of COVID-19 and Brexit.

By critically overviewing testimonies from recruitment agencies, as well as recent think tank reports, and policies on automation and immigration, the paper demonstrates that current aspirations and appeals to automate work seek to depoliticise the economy whilst legitimising a specific kind of governmentality focusing on re-training, self-realisation, and ever increasing growth and productivity. Automation is presented as an unstoppable, irreversible force whose mission is to tackle low productivity and make the economy less dependent on cheap migrant labour. Yet, the discourse of automation and technological displacement allows us to distinguish not only the lack of resources or dependence of workers on state and corporate welfare, but also to identify the ways in which the workforce is categorised and fragmented according to the binaries of competent and incompetent, trained and untrained, skilled and unskilled, educated and uneducated, flexible and inflexible, male and female, young and old.

This article examines the political campaign of the Brexit Party via the conceptual frameworks of cultural performance and the politics of victimhood. The Brexit Party election broadcasts focus predominantly on the post-industrial working class communities by depicting them as forgotten and betrayed and attack the Labour Party as their formerly natural representative for its stance on Brexit. While there is a growing body of research that convincingly examines the rise of national populism as a direct result of distrust towards politicians and the establishment and of demographic and cultural changes there is little as to how notions of victimhood, the white working class and the “left behind” are constructed and performed by the agents of contemporary national populism. By deploying Jeffrey Alexander’s (2011; 2017) conceptualisation of cultural performance as a social process by which actors display for others the meaning of their social situation the paper identifies the current status of victimhood and its political communication in the wider Brexit debate. As a result, the post-industrial working class becomes at once the victim of failed social and economic policies and the authentic representative of a country unable to assert its dominance in the world economy. The social actors in the Brexit Party’s campaign are being motivated by and towards moral and cultural concerns the meaning of which are defined by signifiers of regional inequality and nostalgia. The article makes two different yet interconnected arguments. First, the cultural performance of victimhood is a precondition for contemporary articulations of nationalism and belonging. Second, the cultural performance of victimhood is an indispensable component for the communication of loss, democratic deficit and for presenting the working class as a racialised minority.

This paper identifies the points of convergence and diversion between the discourses of technological displacement and cheap migrant labour respectively and argues for the understanding of a new model of neoliberal governance. Whenever a financial crisis occurs capitalism tends to be restructured. New technologies, new managerial and organisational forms, and new models of exploitation emerge. What are the main features of the most recent capitalist crisis? Drawing on the work of Agamben (2017), Berardi (2017) and Streeck (2016) the paper points out to two different yet interconnected processes.

First, due to the rapid acceleration of the digitalization of the economy the middle class is discussed as an endangered social species (Price Water House Coopers; National Bureau of Economic Research). Up until the 1990s technology mainly displaced the manual working class. In the most recent economic and political crisis the middle classes as the carriers and defenders of capitalism are destined for destitute by the proliferation of robot labourers, automation and artificial intelligence.

Second, due to the increasing popularity of protectionist and populist politics and despite proclamations of taking back control of immigration policy a consensus has emerged indicating the need for cheap, low skilled migrant labour. Even within the discourse of progressive and liberal politics low skilled immigrants are the embodiment of otherness  - they always belong to a different race, ethnic group, country and most importantly culture. Demands for economic growth render the presence of low skilled immigrants necessary as long as they are subjected to the minimum political, economic and social provisions such as wages, political participation and mobility. As a result, low skilled immigrants must exist within a political and economic environment in which they are perceived as useful and at times essential accessories for sustaining economic growth and public services.

The concepts of precarisation and precarity (Lorey 2016; Butler 2016) provide a useful insight into the underlying logic that connects and differentiates those two discourses. In particular, precarisation becomes at once the dominant mode of governing the population and the most effective means for capital accumulation. In contradistinction to old understandings of rule that demanded political compliance in exchange for social protection, the neoliberal process of precarisation increases instability and provides the minimum of insurances. Precarisation is not limited to employment but more generally to the destabilisation of political conduct. Precarity, on the other hand, designates a sense of hierarchy amongst the precarious population namely the middle class and low skilled immigrant labour and the compensations they receive. The paper concludes by arguing that ethnicity and race become integral notions of neoliberal governance for differentiating between precarious groups and maintaining order in neo-capitalist society.