If your wealth comes from work, most people quickly see that its production is a collective endeavour: something that’s done together. And most working people consistently vote to the Left – including Labour in the 2019 election, while voters with wealth are more likely to support right-wing causes – including Brexit – despite what much of the media has tried to convince you about the ‘left behind’.
If, on the other hand, your fortunes come from a random soaring of property values that you benefit from through zero effort, then you’re more likely to see wealth like a hoard of treasure to carefully guard, and portion out through ties of fealty and family.
In 2017, when the Democratic Unionist Party was wading through a swamp of corruption allegations, I spent some time wandering round a Loyalist estate in Belfast, asking people what they thought. There were, of course, several viewpoints, but one perspective has stuck in my mind.
A bald man, who appeared to be in his fifties, pointed to a nearby playground that boasted a new climbing frame in the shape of a tank, and claimed that the DUP was good at bringing money into “the community”.
For him, the allegations of corruption weren’t off-putting. Instead, he found them to be evidence that these were people who could bring treasure back to their clan. He and his family may be at the back of the queue for its distribution, but at least it was coming down their line.
Since then, I’ve found myself in essentially the same conversation again and again in various countries. I heard this viewpoints from supporters of the far-Right party Fidesz in Hungary (similarly widely believed to be corrupt); from voters for Andrej Babiš in Czechia, who is both prime minister and the country’s second richest man; and from voters for Smer, the long-term governing party of Slovakia, which was deposed last year.
Pirate kings of imperial plunder
Often, this view of corruption tessellates with specific chapters of nationalist mythology: wealth and contracts are doled out first to the strong men of the country, or the heroes of this or that moment in history.
This applies just as much in Britain, where the ruling class secured its place in the national myth as the pirate kings of imperial plunder, as in Hungary, where oligarchs' images reflect with the Magyar warlords who came down from the steppe to found the country.
If your family’s place in line for the share of national treasure is determined by history, then a certain view of history must be defended at all cost – which is why it’s becoming a specific offence to damage a statue you object to in the UK, and why Hungarian historians have been dragged through the courts for criticising the country’s medieval kings.
For the Orbáns and Johnsons of the world, though, this strategy comes with a risk. For the past decade, both Fidesz and the Tories have built political support on the thin skin of a housing bubble. But the thing about bubbles is, they burst.
Although the pandemic has accelerated Britain’s property market boom, in Hungary, the collapse in the buy-to-AirBnB market in Budapest has put a pin in Orbán’s floating sunbed. In 2020, house prices fell by 18%, and his support has crashed in the polls, to the extent that he could well lose the next election.
In contrast, the British property market is inflated by a national obsession with home decor as well as the money laundering of oligarchs. COVID has diminished neither.
And so Johnson continues to be king, straddling his ever-inflating bouncy castle – as the super rich get richer, and the average working Briton gets poorer.
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