5 - Building Blocs: Towards a Politics of Articulation

Summary

The Battle for Britain has generated unusual political turbulence. The long decade from 2010 included a coalition government (Conservative– Liberal Democrat, 2010– 15), the rapid rise of an outsider party (the Nigel Farageled UKIP), two referenda (over Scottish Independence and the vote on EU membership), and a Conservative minority government when Theresa May failed to lead the Conservatives to a majority in 2017. May was replaced by Boris Johnson who then led the party to a landslide victory in 2019, campaigning on the promise to ‘get Brexit done’ and in 2022 he resigned and was replaced as leader and Prime Minister by Liz Truss – who resigned after 45 days. The accelerating churn of party politics is a feature of the trajectory of this conjuncture and makes it harder to keep the wider dynamics of the conjuncture in sight.

In this chapter, I build on Stuart Hall's idea of articulation as a politicalcultural practice to think about how social forces are addressed and mobilised conjuncturally. I begin from a critical examination of approaches to politics as structured by social divisions, exemplified in Sobolewska and Ford's (2020a) account of Brexitland as embodying divisions between identity conservatives and identity liberals. In contrast, I suggest that it is important to treat people as plural subjects who inhabit a shifting and contested field of social relations. These give rise to different potential affiliations, identifications and solidarities. My arguments build on the preceding chapter's analysis of the heterogeneous social relations and the multiple social forces that are active in a conjuncture. This provides me with a route into thinking about the processes of building political-cultural blocs, processes that seek to articulate different groups into a temporary unity.

The concept of blocs is borrowed – and adapted – from the work of Antonio Gramsci, for whom it was central to his thoughts about constructing and contesting hegemony. Returning to the moment of Brexit, I explore the political work that went into assembling a ‘Brexit bloc’, involving the mobilisation of different desires and disaffections through the promise to ‘take back control’.