When you divide your time evenly between two countries, as I do, you learn both to appreciate and accept their differences. One thing distinguishing the UK from Australia is that in the former, a majority still supports the death penalty, while in the latter, only a minority do.

This is despite Britain’s last hanging taking place in 1964, while Australia’s came later, in 1967. Indeed, if you believe pollsters, Australia’s flip—when the pro-capital punishment side definitively lost its majority—came in 1995. In Britain, that flip has never happened. Meanwhile, both countries abolished capital punishment many years ago (UK 1969; Australia 1985).

I had to have a couple of impressive rows with both Brits and Australians on the death penalty issue before I learnt not to confuse two countries separated by a common language with each other.

I was reminded of those arguments and mistaking one country’s people for another’s despite superficial similarities when reading Matt Goodwin’s Values, Voice, and Virtue: the New British Politics. At the heart of Goodwin’s book is a story about similar failures of understanding, but within the United Kingdom.

Goodwin’s core claim—that the people who govern the UK, both left and right, consistently mistake their own preferences for those of the people they purport to represent—is superbly made in this book. It’s worth reading for the “voice” section alone. Unfortunately, the people Goodwin sets out to criticise have been able to stick their fingers in their ears and go lalalalala in his face because he makes a definitional error in the first twenty pages and then—perhaps realising it—must keep going back and nibbling around the edges to get it to do statistical work. This is particularly so when he discusses polling data, which does not support his initial overgeneralisation. Goodwin is a fine pollster and polling analyst, which makes this genuinely awkward.

As part of the fingers-in-ears-lalalala response from both academics and members of the commentariat, we were treated (aren’t we always?) to some splendid Twitter derangement. Why is it that everyone’s slip shows on Twitter? It seems all those who signed up for an account back in the day also agreed to engage in an annual, public, custard-pie faceplant for everyone else’s amusement.

This means I’m going to break my own rule and set out how Goodwin could have avoided this error. Once a more precise definition is deployed, his suggestion that the UK is governed by people who fail to see the world as others (in the same country) see it—and that this is crippling British governance—turns out to be true.

Goodwin suggests that a “New Elite” consisting of university graduates with “radically progressive values” has taken control of our institutions—including the Commons and bodies like the British Museum—and looks down on “the morally inferior masses,” whom it dismisses as racists and xenophobes.

This New Elite, he argues, “has taken full control of the political institutions, the think-tanks, the civil service, the public bodies, the universities, the creative industries, the cultural institutions and much of the media.” It claims, among other things, that “Western nations such as Britain are institutionally racist,” it sees British identity and history as “a source of shame,” and feels less attached to national identity and “the wider national group.”

However, it doesn’t take long for this sweeping catch-all to unravel. Goodwin is too good a pollster to let it stand—indeed, if another political scientist argued similarly, Goodwin would be quick to manoeuvre some statistics into view.

Clearly, there will always be outliers, people who do not sit neatly in either camp, such as the one-quarter of Britain’s graduates and one in three black and minority ethnic voters who voted for Brexit, the one in five 18-24-year-olds who voted for Boris Johnson and the four in ten who left school after their GCSEs but who still support Labour and the Left.

That is Goodwin, contra Goodwin. It reads like a critical review of his own book.

Back when I was covering Brexit for all and sundry (including Law & Liberty) I drew on an analysis developed by political historian Stephen Davies of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Davies later expanded on his arguments at book length in The Economics and Politics of Brexit: The Realignment of British Public Life. For whatever reason—whether because Davies works for a think-tank and not a university, or because he’s perceived to be a “libertarian weirdo”—Goodwin has not used any of his research. There’s no Davies in Goodwin’s (extensive) footnotes. This, to my mind, is a missed opportunity. The IEA is not poor. Davies also has access to lots of rich polling data and knows how to use it.

Mind you, libertarians are indeed considered bonkers in Britain. Commentator Ed West once joked that there are only 27 in the entire country. Unfortunately for the Conservative Party, Liz Truss of only-44-days-in-No-10 fame was one of them.

To that end, I’ve adapted Davies’s approach to Britain’s political divisions and governance groups, applying his framing to Goodwin’s definitional problem in Values, Voice and Virtue, noting similarities and teasing out differences. I’ve retained the names both Davies and I used in various places, even though—as Goodwin rightly points out—the issues dividing the country have changed since Brexit.

If parliament did reflect the country and its political parties were labelled accordingly, there would be four of them, all with strong geographical bases: Radical Remainia, Liberal Remainia, Brexitshire, and Leaverstan.

Radical Remainia is made up of younger, university-educated voters. They live in London, major metropolitan areas, and university towns. They have a strong foothold in Scotland, where they vote for the SNP. They are concerned about the environment (even if they don’t personally join Extinction Rebellion protests), often engage in what is called “identity politics,” and favour both immigration and significant economic redistribution. They are consistently and almost uniformly anti-war but (in England) combine this with an active dislike for their own country. They do wield considerable power in institutions like universities, but also spend a lot of time scrapping with Liberal Remainia over economics, in part because they are much poorer.

Liberal Remainia voters live in Southeast England and the M4 corridor, with a sprinkling in Scotland and Northern Ireland. They are affluent, professional, university educated, and employed in sectors with significant international exposure. They are more pro-market and fiscally conservative than the inhabitants of Radical Remainia and not particularly committed to wealth redistribution. They tend to favour “humanitarian intervention” and do not see eye-to-eye with Radical Remainia on this point. Both Remainia groups are, of course, “cosmopolitans” or “globalists” (to use the political argot developed in the wake of the 2016 referendum and the election of Donald Trump).

Brexitshire voters also live in Southeast England and the M4 corridor, with a dusting elsewhere in Wales and the West Country. They are demographically like Liberal Remainia voters although there is a greater preponderance among them of private sector employment and post-school qualifications in STEM or skilled trades rather than humanities or social sciences. They are pro-market, uninterested in economic redistribution, tend not to be bothered by immigration, but are strongly patriotic. Their nationalism—while supportive of HM Forces—does not extend to “vanity wars” like Iraq, Libya, or Syria on the basis that intervening over there leads to unwanted refugees over here.

When discussing Goodwin’s demographic data about the emergence of a “New Elite,” it’s crucial to remember that Brexitshire and Liberal Remainia are quite like each other. Importantly, they agree on economics but disagree on some cultural issues.

The “Singapore-on-Thames” model of Brexit that the Tory Party came to embrace—especially during the brief and disastrous premiership of Liz Truss—is popular in both Brexitshire and Liberal Remainia. The Tory Party is also full of Brexitshire members, and because they form part (but only part) of Goodwin’s “New Elite,” they have a big voice.

Goodwin briefly mentions that 25 per cent of Britain’s graduates voted Leave. I’d bet good money they all live in the Southeast (parts of which were strongly Leave) and share a constellation of views that tends to hold both universities and the academics who teach in them in contempt. This is despite being just as posh and privileged as the Liberal Remainia graduates who opposed them during and after the 2016 Referendum. These are people who went to Oxbridge and the Russell Group, entered the professions, and then never darkened their university’s door again because they think universities are a good place to get a credential but are also full of tossers.

People are now actively discouraged from engaging in acts of imaginative empathy. This has not only had a disastrous effect on literature. It’s made a mess of our politics, too.

Finally, we come to Leaverstan. These are working-class voters in small towns and older industrial regions in the North, Midlands, and Wales. They also dominate in coastal areas. They are the least likely of any of the four groups to be university-educated. They are opposed to immigration—but intensely patriotic in much the same way as Brexitshire—while supporting significant economic redistribution in a way that Brexitshire absolutely does not. They compete with Radical Remainia when it comes to professing undying love for the National Health Service. Both Brexitshire and Leaverstan fall on the “nationalist” side of the post-Trump political divide, in opposition to cosmopolitanism or globalism. If they have a core politics, it’s “hang the paedos, fund the NHS.” They are nothing like either Liberal Remainia or Brexitshire but do agree with Radical Remainia on economics.

Of the four groups, Leaverstan is the largest, forming close to a plurality of the electorate. They are not, however, numerous enough by themselves to win government in a First Past the Post, constituency-based electoral system. Victory in a GE demands an electoral coalition with at least one of the other three groups.

In December 2019, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives scooped up all of Brexitshire, a lot of Leaverstan, and some of Liberal Remainia. It is Davies who points out, accurately, that the Liberal Democrat position of not even bothering with Sir Keir Starmer’s proposed second referendum and simply revoking notification under Article 50—so ignoring the referendum result—was “a policy that even many Remain supporters thought both extreme and arrogant and, above all, anti-democratic.” Those economic-right denizens of Liberal Remainia were not going to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, either. Many of them—while more cosmopolitan and pro-immigration (from Europe, at least) than Brexitshire or Leaverstan—are not at all woke. In collapsing them into the same group as Radical Remainia, Goodwin misses a trick.

That Radical Remainia and Liberal Remainia really are very different from each other in areas unrelated to economics has been exposed in spades over the trans issue. While present in December 2019, trans was submarined—like everything else—by Brexit. Since then, it’s brought down Nicola Sturgeon, is in the process of destroying the SNP, and has become a reliable “top five” political issue.

The trans debate is thus a dispute between the Remainias. Brexitshire and Leaverstan are united in pointing and laughing at two groups of people they consider off their chump. Commentators forget that both feminism and gender identity ideology are considered deeply weird in these Islands, very much minority concerns. Do people really think Kathleen Stock, Helen Joyce, Graham Linehan, Maya Forstater, J. K. Rowling, and their feminist or quasi-feminist friends voted Leave in 2016 and then Tory in December 2019? If so, I’d like to interest them in my collection of bridges.

Liberal Remainia and Brexitshire have money and houses. Radical Remainia may have a lot of followers on Twitter or TikTok but goes home to a shoe-box-sized bedsit in Bermondsey or Brighton. Leaverstan, meanwhile, is genuinely on the outer. Liberal Remainia and (currently) Brexitshire run the country. Radical Remainia wants to run the country but—unless Labour is elected next year—must content itself with the universities and charitable sector. Both Liberal Remainia and Brexitshire mistake their preferences for Radical Remainia and Leaverstan’s preferences, and so fail at governance for the reasons Goodwin describes in his “Voice” section.

As Australian commentator Lorenzo Warby observes, the molehill of truth on which movements concerned with “own voices,” “cultural appropriation,” and “stay in your lane” build their mountains of bullshit is that entering imaginatively into someone else’s experience and understanding their preferences is hard. This is coupled with the reality that genuine literary talent is rare. It’s also possible to possess psychological insight into people unlike oneself and lack writing skills, or to be blessed with verbal facility and lack insight. If all people who wrote well had insight, anyone with verbal facility could be a novelist.

That this combined skillset is hard to come by has led theorists of various stripes to suggest it is impossible to acquire. People are now actively discouraged from engaging in acts of imaginative empathy. This has not only had a disastrous effect on literature. It’s made a mess of our politics, too. Gone, I suspect, is the prospect of a Benjamin Disraeli figure—with his ability to understand the two nations—emerging in modern British politics.

I mentioned earlier the extent to which the death penalty is popular in Britain. Goodwin provides a laundry list of similar issues (backed by extensive research) where Liberal Remainia and Brexitshire are out-of-step with the rest of the country, with each other, and more to the point make no effort to understand why Radical Remainia and Leaverstan act and believe as they do. Yes, Goodwin is more concerned with Leaverstan than with Radical Remainia, partly because there are more of them, but partly because his book starts off with a loose “New Elite” definition and never really escapes it.

Rather than recapitulate his polling data and focus group analysis—which I encourage readers to explore when reading Values, Voice and Virtue, I’ll conclude here with one of his stories. It’s worthy of Disraeli at his best in what it captures about Britain’s governance class.

Everything about the day was quintessentially British. Homemade cakes and bacon butties were on sale in the village hall, people were drinking tea in the cricket pavilion, and children were enjoying the egg-and-spoon race, coconut shy, bouncy castle, and a tug-of-war. Even the local MP, Labour’s Helen Goodman, had come along to open the fair and give a speech to her constituents.

Goodman talked powerfully and eloquently about Ingleton—the beautiful waterfalls, the deep caves, and the majestic peaks which offered hikers a glimpse of heaven.

The only problem was that her voters had no idea what she was talking about. There were no waterfalls, caves, or peaks in Ingleton. The one person who was supposed to represent their voice in Westminster—and who also happened to have graduated from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics—had confused their village with another village that was seventy miles away and represented by a different MP.