Against the backdrop of a serious, growing, and multi-faceted economic crisis, the Tory leadership contest grinds on. The two contenders have little to say that matches the scale of this crisis and even less about Brexit, which is not only one of its components but the one most obviously unique to the UK. Nor do they speak of the immediate political problem Brexit will pose for whichever of them wins, namely the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill (NIPB). Yet, for all the silence, Brexit lurks beneath the contest; a ghost, a proxy, an indelible tattoo.
The leadership contest
One proxy is the candidates’ stoking of the anti-woke culture war. For the Brexit vote coded many things including the division between social liberals and social traditionalists and, in the mind of the Brexiters, those who ‘talk the country down’ and ‘those who love Britain’. Like much else about Brexit, this division wasn’t created in 2016 so much as given new zest and, despite existing in a different context, is a continuation of the decades-long whining about ‘political correctness’, the UK version of post-1960s backlash politics.
Indeed, there’s a dated feeling to the entire contest, especially in the constant invocations of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps reflecting the age and political reference points of the selectorate that will choose the next Prime Minister. It’s reminiscent of the way Conservatives still argue about whether Thatcher would or would not have supported Brexit, still vying for the imprimatur of the Iron Lady, or perhaps just for mummy’s approval. Equally, albeit again in a different context, the contest reveals the same contradiction of espousing free market, global free trade economics alongside social traditionalism and nationalism as that within Thatcherism. A similar contradiction, in fact, to that within the voting coalition of globalists and nativists that gave us Brexit.
Of course the many ways in which the context is different to the 1970s and 1980s only serve to reinforce the sense of a disconnect between this political discussion and current realities. The nature of the economic crisis is radically different. The geo-politics of the post-Cold War world are different. The politics of the Union are different. The now inescapable climate crisis is very different. Thoughtful Conservative commentators, such as Tim Pitt (£), warn that “cheap imitations of Thatcherism will not help the next prime minister tackle [these] formidable challenges”, but thoughtful Conservatism is long out of fashion, again in large part because of Brexit and its fallout.
It's not just that today’s issues are different to the 1970s and 80s. So too is political demography: in appealing to the ‘backlash generation’ the Tories have, apparently deliberately, chosen to set themselves against the young, the university-educated, and the urban. Yet, at the same time – and again it continues a trend that began under Thatcher but was spiced up by Brexit – contemporary Conservatives also despise the ‘traditional elites’ of the civil service, judiciary and business that used to form part of their heartlands.
All these groups, and more, are now disparaged in the new, omnipresent insult of ‘the Blob’ and its cognates ‘the remainer Blob’, ‘the Woke Blob’ (£) and ‘the Left Blob’, along with endless sub-variants like ‘the NHS Blob’ (£). It’s a terminology which, in the UK, is one of the many noxious legacies of Dominic Cummings who, when an advisor to the then Education Secretary Michael Gove, coined ‘the Education Blob’ as a term to disparage all those who actually knew anything about education. As such, it bears a family relationship to Gove’s notorious ‘we’ve had enough of experts’ line during the referendum campaign. It has now become a lazy catch-all term of abuse, as well as an excuse for governmental failures.
The (self-)importance of Frost
Woeful though they are, these terms of reference may well be adequate, and perhaps even unavoidable, in a contest pitched at the party membership, although it remains an open question whether they are a viable framing for the general election campaign that must come within two years. They certainly lack any discernible intellectual coherence or merit. But cometh the hour, cometh the man. A hero to many in the Tory Party, he is rumoured to be in line for a significant role if Liz Truss, the current favourite and his preferred candidate, wins. And he has stepped forward in a bid to provide just the coherence that is wanting.
Unfortunately, that man turns out to be David Frost who, with his habitual and limitless self-importance, this week published his Policy Exchange “essay” aspiring to exactly the big picture analysis that would enable the new leader to solve all the nation’s problems. Never one to understate anything, expect perhaps his own mediocrity, he boastfully presents this as an undertaking akin to the ‘Stepping Stones’ report that set a path for – yes, of course – the Thatcher administrations.
Apparently this is an effort that has been many years in the making but which his governmental duties had precluded writing. Now the truth can be told. Yet, for all the years of Frost’s tongue-between-teeth intellectual toil, it is, as the tagging of Thatcher prefigures, for the most part a reheat of her policies of lower taxes and a smaller state. If it differs from the intellectual pitch-rolling 1970s thinktanks undertook for Thatcher, it is mainly in lacking any kind of detailed prescriptions, relying instead on evergreen banalities such as calls to “reform our disgraceful prisons” or to “modernise the NHS”. On the newer challenge of climate change, the dangers of this constituting an ‘emergency’ are loftily dismissed as not being supported by the evidence.
What of Brexit?
One important implication of all this ‘back to Thatcher’ maundering is that almost nothing proposed here, or by the leadership candidates, actually requires Brexit. Indeed the first “pillar” of Frost’s proposals is that “the public must come to feel that we have taken a wrong path and to react against it”. But, hold on, isn’t that exactly what the public had been told, and responded to, in 2016? Wasn’t Brexit the new path? Must we now, just six years later and less than two years since the end of the transition period, embark on yet another new path?
The answer, it seems, is that “Brexit in itself creates neither huge economic advantage nor disadvantage”. Alas, this is not what leave voters were guaranteed in 2016. And puzzlingly, despite this apparent neutrality of Brexit, in the same paragraph Frost asserts that “leaving the EU has already hugely shaped our politics and political economy”. Indeed it is a “huge discontinuity” and yet, apparently, only the prelude to the next one, which will sustain the “Brexit Revolt”. The theme of revolt permeates the essay and presumably informs his grandiose choice of Lenin’s “What is to be done?” as the title of the prescriptive chapter, hard as it is to picture ‘the Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG’ chugging wheezily up the steps of the Winter Palace.
In reality, this call to a new path is a tacit admission that Brexit has failed. Not only are there none of the huge advantages that had been promised, but Frost is forced to concede it has come with “some costs” which he downplays as not “material” and not amounting to the “disasters” predicted. This is the now boilerplate Brexiter position that forgets the promises of ‘sunny uplands’ in favour of the rather more modest definition of success being the avoidance of total disaster. Thus ‘Project Fear’ is supposedly discredited since the effects of Brexit haven’t been as bad as some of the Brexiters’ own hyperbolic renderings of the most extreme warnings, and it is taken as read that all the ‘Establishment’ forecasts have been discredited.
In fact, the Treasury long-term forecast of 2016 for the scenario of Brexit with a UK-EU trade deal, whereby after 15 years GDP is in the range of 4.6%-7.8% lower than it would otherwise have been, now looks as if it will be fairly accurate, with the latest NIESR projection being for 5%-6% lower over 15 years. Those are still projections, but they are consistent with actual performance so far, with the latest CER calculation suggesting that at the last quarter of 2021 GDP was between 4.9% and 5.2% lower than it would have been. By any normal meaning of the term that is, indeed, a huge, and ongoing, economic disadvantage. As for all the reports of other damages of Brexit across just about every sphere of life that have accrued, these are airily dismissed by Frost as “rarely justified by reality”. The running sore of the Northern Ireland Protocol that he negotiated gets even shorter shrift, as no more than an “issue” that “must be resolved”.
Brexit’s coy revolutionaries
The grudging recognition that Brexit has been an economic failure has been growing amongst the Thatcherite Brexiters for a year or so, and I discussed it in detail in a post last December. The proposition it leads to is one re-iterated by Frost. His suggestion is that the problem is the “psychological hangover” of EU membership, which means “the EU is still a reference point for too many issues and policies”. He means, in particular, that this has hampered deregulation and “supply-side reforms”. Yet Frost is very coy about giving any details. The same is true of Sunak and Truss, as well as numerous others, like Mark Sedwill (£) who this week trotted out yet another of the interminable articles in the pro-Brexit press about cutting EU red tape without specifying which rules would go.
So what are the ‘supply-side reforms’ that Frost and the leadership candidates envisage? It’s a loose term, and to talk as they do of deregulation and supply-side reforms is unhelpful as the latter term usually includes the former, alongside free trade and tax cuts. As regards tax cuts, such reform is often associated with the largely discredited ‘Laffer Curve’, which, in brief, suggests that, at least to a certain point, cutting taxes will increase tax revenues and also promote growth. This seems now to the be the basis of both Sunak’s and Truss’s tax plans (itself based, again, on a selective reading of Thatcher-era policies). But since, whatever its dubious virtues, such a policy could be pursued with or without Brexit, and given the particular flagging of the term, it’s obvious that deregulation is a central issue.
The mirage of deregulation
The vagueness about what this deregulation is to consist of is because of a number of inter-related reasons, all of which in different ways relate to the incoherence of the Brexit project. It might refer to regulatory divergence from the EU on things like product standards or data protection. The problem here is that, as the government has already found, such deregulation is unpopular with businesses because it reduces rather than extends the scope of their markets. Indeed that is hardly surprising – these shared regulations are the essence of the single market, and one of the reasons Thatcher herself was a single market enthusiast.
Moreover, in the current global economy, they are very often adopted well beyond the EU single market or, just as often, the EU standards themselves derive from other global bodies. For any one country, especially one that does half its trade with the EU and which is bound, by virtue of proximity, to continue to do a high volume of its trade with the EU, setting its own standards just doesn’t make economic sense. Nor is it compatible with the ‘free trade’ aspect of supply-side reform.
What has happened is that the latter-day Thatcher imitators have mistaken different kinds of regulation and deregulation. Some regulation, including that of the single market, is market-making. In those cases, deregulation reduces rather than extends the market. More than that, in the case of leaving the rules of the single market (and the customs union), it re-instates the regulation that otherwise exists. Hence Brexit has massively increased the ‘red tape’ (or regulatory) burden on trade with the EU even without any regulatory divergence (a common Brexiter myth is that having the same standards ought to mean trading as before, but it doesn’t absent of being part of the regulatory and legal eco-system of the single market: this was the myth that underpinned Liam Fox’s ‘easiest deal in history’ foolishness). Adding regulatory divergence to this will further increase, not decrease, those barriers to trade.
By contrast, some of the Thatcher-era deregulation was market-making. For example, changes to financial services law in the 1980s removed the restrictions on services that Building Societies could offer (e.g. cheque accounts and unsecured loans) so that they could compete with banks. The desirability of that, and other parts of 1980s financial services deregulation, can be debated, of course, but the present point is that this deregulation did indeed extend rather than reduce the market (more precisely, it re-regulated to do so). Thatcher’s Brexiter imitators, including Frost, Rees-Mogg, Sunak and Truss, have wrongly concluded that removing EU regulations from the UK statute book is akin to this kind of deregulation, when in fact it is the opposite. It’s more like getting rid of the laws that enabled building societies and banks to compete, and reverting to the barriers that previously existed so as to segment their markets.
The other aspect of this, and the reason for the coyness about specifics, is that many kinds of deregulation are likely to be highly unpopular not just with businesses but with voters once the implications are known. That applies not just to product and environmental standards but, perhaps even more, to reductions of employment and other rights if, as seems likely, this is the agenda that remains unspoken. Many voters, including many who supported Brexit, will not support that and, depending exactly what is envisaged, it could again militate against free trade aspirations, especially if it violated the level playing field clauses of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
There’s obviously nothing new about these ideas in British politics, nor about the idea that one significant strand of Brexiter motivation was to enact them. But it was only one strand, and as a result Brexit doesn’t give enough cover for it, reflecting the perennial Brexit problem that the 2016 vote was not a vote for any particular meaning of Brexit. Many parts of the leave-voting coalition would bitterly oppose this deregulatory agenda – not just some ‘Red Wall’ nationalist traditionalists but also some ‘Blue Wall’ One Nation liberals. Since this is the same coalition that supported Johnson in 2019, a government under either contestant would struggle to deliver it just as he did. Certainly, it is, at the very least, unclear that they could retain that coalition in a general election fought explicitly upon such a manifesto.
Two faces of Brexit
All of this serves to illustrate the misnomer of the subtitle of Frost’s ‘essay’, “Reality-based politics and sustaining the Brexit Revolt”. For the ‘Brexit Revolt’ was never a singular movement, and it only briefly maintained a coalition of diverse discontents by the denial of reality; by insisting that it was possible to ‘have our cake and eat it’, a cost-free Brexit and one which could deliver all of the contradictory promises made for it. Those false promises have already been exposed, not least in relation to Frost’s own bugbear, the Northern Ireland Protocol.
This means that Frost’s ‘third pillar’ for the future, a reclaimed national identity “to bed in the view irreversibly that leaving the EU was the necessary precursor to achieving this” has already failed. Brexit has already further divided the union, and it has bitterly divided the population at large. There is absolutely no recognition from Frost, or from any other Brexiter, of this, still less any responsibility taken for it. There is not the tiniest suggestion that he and they are to any degree at fault for what has happened. Instead, the idea is to push on even harder in the same direction, once again treating the 2016 referendum as a mandate for things never put to the electorate and yet, in a grotesque political spoonerism, claimed as a triumph of democracy.
These ongoing divisions of Brexit actually permeate the leadership election, despite Brexit not being mentioned much, and not in itself constituting a dividing line between the candidates. For one way to think about the Truss-Sunak contest is as being between treating Brexit as a kind of Year Zero, instigating a permanent revolution against established realities of economics, geography, law or convention, and a more orthodox, pragmatic pre-Brexit though pro-Brexit, Conservatism.
Despite how they themselves voted in the referendum Truss is firmly the candidate for the former camp, being almost Johnsonian in her relationship to truth, and Sunak represents the latter. It’s not surprising, and doesn’t bode well for Sunak’s chances given their smaller numbers, that whereas opinion polls suggest he narrowly leads (53-47) amongst Tory Party members who were remain voters, Truss massively leads (81-19) amongst those who voted leave (figures exclude don’t knows/ won’t votes).
Both are equally committed to Brexit, so that isn’t the point at issue. What is at issue is the contradiction between Brexit as a ‘reality-based’ policy agenda to be delivered by government and ‘Brexitism’ as a campaigning, insurgent mood of permanent ‘revolt’. Truss embodies that mood, albeit less vividly than Johnson, whereas Sunak’s belated efforts to do so appear uncomfortable and he is already being attacked (£) for his technocratic caution having ‘frustrated’ Brexit.
It’s a contradiction we’ve seen before. Theresa May treated Brexit as a policy to be enacted, and was destroyed by those who wanted the mood and the campaign, and didn’t like the reality at all. Johnson provided the mood and the campaign, but couldn’t enact the policy to the satisfaction of Brexiters. This wasn’t just about their individual failings, considerable as those were, it was about the impossibility of doing both.
The unavoidable impossibility of post-Brexit politics
So Frost’s call for “Reality-based politics and sustaining the Brexit Revolt” misses the fact that there is actually a choice: reality-based politics or sustaining the Brexit Revolt. A ‘revolt’ can’t also be a government. It also misses the fact that whichever of the two is chosen, it will not satisfy Brexiters for long. The ultimate cakeism of Brexit is their refusal to make that choice, the ultimate tragedy for the country is that winning the referendum forced it upon them. It’s that impossible dynamic which is still ongoing, lies silently at the heart of the current leadership campaign, and will persist whoever wins.
So if Truss wins, it won’t be long before the complaints start that she is lightweight, prone to empty gestures and u-turning under pressure, talks the talk of Brexit but doesn’t walk the walk. She certainly doesn’t have a strong track record of policy delivery. And it’s notable that although the original basis of her popularity with the party membership was her flashy announcements of ‘getting trade deals done’, providing them with at least the illusion of Brexit being delivered, the hard-core free marketers see the deals she has agreed with Australia and New Zealand as far too timid, and as having given in to UK producer interests (of course UK producers don’t see it that way, nor, apparently, does Sunak). She’ll have a go at the deregulatory fantasy, but nothing much will come of it for the same reasons as nothing much has come of it under Johnson. No doubt her one-time support for remain will be recalled. As time goes on, sustaining the revolt won’t be enough without providing the reality of what the Brexiters think is possible. A salesperson with nothing to sell. Johnson 2.0.
If Sunak wins, he may well make a serious attempt to enact Brexit: to make it a reality. He too will find himself ensnared in the illusions of deregulation but perhaps he will push on anyway, in which case the economic crisis will get worse. Perhaps he won’t, and will be lambasted by Brexiters for that. He may well, as Truss also promises, plaster his beloved freeports all over the country (though, given a conspiracy theory which seems to currently be gaining traction, it’s worth mentioning that there are no plans to create Charter Cities in the UK and that these are radically different to freeports on any normal meaning of either term). But still the Brexiters will say he has not delivered real Brexit, either in terms of the general economy, for freeports are not an economic panacea, or in terms of what many leavers thought they were voting for as regards secure and well-paid jobs and improved public services. No doubt his background as a globalist, ‘citizen of nowhere’ investment banker will be recalled. As time goes on, the reality will collide with revolt. Tarnished goods offered by someone with no sales skills. May 2.0.
These categorisations are probably overly stark, and in practice each of them will mix ‘reality’ and ‘revolt’ (as did May and Johnson) but still skewed in one or the other direction. But either will have to decide which way to go quite quickly on one key issue, because of the choices they will face over the NIPB. Again there is no solution here which will satisfy both the desire for perpetual revolt and the reality-based politics of economic and governmental rationality. That circle can only be squared by insisting that ‘the Blob’, rather than the government, is in charge, so they are still insurgents who, if they win, can deliver the promises of Brexit. It’s unclear, though, for how long an electorate facing multiple crises will support a government whose central message is its inability to govern.
Showing posts with label Culture wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Culture wars. Show all posts
Friday, 12 August 2022
Friday, 16 July 2021
Another country?
The big story of the week is football. Given the volume of comment there has been, it’s difficult to say anything which is interesting or original but, as mentioned in my previous post, it’s hard not to connect it with Brexit so I’ll try to say something about it even though I don’t know much about football (I support Crystal Palace, boom-boom).
For some, of course, the connection is of a negative sort in that the whole tournament could be seen as welcome for being nothing to do with Brexit or politics. Or, which may be a different version of the same thing, as showing how the divisions of Brexit could be healed. A few suggested that England’s success represented a triumph of Brexit. Others thought that Gareth Southgate, in particular, and his team in general, articulated and embodied a new progressive patriotism that was at odds with Brexit. Some in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland may have wondered what a Number 10 decked out with St George’s flags had to do with them.
Then came the post-tournament fall-out over taking the knee, booing taking the knee (and the condemning or condoning of that), the thuggery of some supporters, the racist attacks on England’s black footballers, and their and others’ responses to it. Unavoidably, this is about politics. Unavoidably, too, it is an aspect of the culture wars that have been simmering over Brexit itself as well as over racism, the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ politics, and, at the most generic level, over the (different) questions of what it now means to be English and of what it now means to be British.
A nation not at ease with itself
There can never be a single answer to such questions. The idea of a ‘united’ country is necessarily a somewhat absurd one, all the more so when, as with the UK, it is made up of more than one country. National cultures are just too complex and heterogenous to be capturable in any one way, and attempts to make them so are likely to be unpleasantly totalitarian and, even then, not to be fully realized. For that matter, the received image that World War Two Britain saw ‘everyone pulling together for the common good’ is somewhat misleading, as can be seen from the many published Mass Observation diaries, as well as the work of historians like Angus Calder.
Even so, there has been a palpable sense during the Brexit years of Britain as a country more than usually riven, and more than usually divided over both its understanding of its own past and its present-day meaning, let alone its future direction. It has become a cliché that whereas the 2012 London Olympics seemed to present a country that had some comfort with itself, Brexit slammed into that like a wrecking ball. So whilst the notion of a ‘nation at ease with itself’ is a rather illusory one, it has been tangible since Brexit that Britain is a nation that isn’t at ease with itself.
Some of that is to do with race and ethnicity. Manifestly Britain isn’t the only country where that is so, so it would be lazy to ascribe everything to Brexit. It is also lazy to explain Brexit solely, or even necessarily mainly, in terms of anti-immigration sentiment - but it would be entirely dishonest to deny it having been a significant driver. For all that some Brexiters may have disowned it, they were content to profit from, for example, the UKIP “Breaking Point” poster.
Certainly the promise to end freedom of movement of people was a major factor in the vote to leave, and also a decisive one in the subsequent decision that that meant leaving the single market. And the post-Brexit culture war has been very much conducted on the terrain of ‘cracking down’ on asylum seekers and of controlling immigration (though both of these pre-date Brexit) as well as things like the battles over statues with associations with slavery and colonialism.
But that culture war has other fronts as well. Examples include ongoing skirmishes over ‘cancel culture’ and freedom of speech. In particular, there are remarkably strong connections and overlaps between Brexit and anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown and anti-mask positions. That may be less of a cleavage between leave and remain voters, but is fairly clear at the level of the high-profile Brexiter leaders in politics and the media – Farage being the most obvious example, and the links between the ERG and the ‘Covid Recovery Group’ of Tory MPs being another.
Johnson’s vulnerability
Within all this, Boris Johnson has clearly been an important figure but in a rather peculiar way. Despite fronting the Vote Leave campaign, his commitment to Brexit was never very deep or genuine and, as is well-known, he nearly backed remain. Covid forced him into backing restrictions which, undoubtedly, he would have opposed had he not been Prime Minister, and his antipathy to them explains why he was always late to adopt them and usually gives the impression that he doesn’t fully support them.
Crucially, it is clearly the case that fomenting the culture war has been part of a deliberate strategy developed by senior government advisers (£) who see it as central to holding together Johnson’s electoral coalition. It is this strategy which has now caught him out – especially in refusing to condemn the booing of knee-taking and then, with wearying inevitability, lying about it – in the same way as it has caught out Priti Patel.
It remains to be seen how this now plays out, but Johnson’s particular vulnerability is the naked opportunism of his desire for popularity, which makes charges of hypocrisy easy and, therefore, public conviction on those charges an ever-present possibility, especially now that it brings him into conflict with the likeable, gifted, articulate and extremely popular English football stars. If nothing else, it exposes the difference between ‘popular’ and ‘populist’, something which some Tories are now realizing and which the Labour Party has begun to explore.
2016: the national conversation we didn’t know we were having
Johnson’s fate isn’t, however, the main issue in the football rows. What is more important, I think, is that they show an appetite for a ‘national conversation’ (whatever that might actually mean) about ‘what kind of country’ – or, rather, countries - we are which challenges the apparent victory of the Brexiter narrative of ‘the people’. The latter didn’t happen as the result of such a national conversation but emerged, almost accidentally, as the result of a sort of smash and grab raid because, at the time of the referendum, few people quite understood what was going on (I certainly didn’t).
That was perhaps because the general assumption, on all sides, was that remain would win. So we didn’t really know that we weren’t just deciding whether or not to leave the EU but were engaged in something which was about to shape the entirety of what ‘we’ – the United Kingdom, England – meant, both for ourselves and for how we are seen abroad. (A recent example of the latter is German journalist Annette Dittert’s evisceration of Johnson’s regime.)
So, in a way which wouldn’t have been the case had remain won, literally overnight a radical alteration occurred in the terrain and texture of politics. Very soon it became clear that the Brexit process wasn’t going to be just one of ‘technical’ adjustments but would be a battle for Britain’s ‘political soul’. With that, it emerged, as I wrote a few weeks ago, that Brexit had, in effect, ‘cancelled’ half the population as being of no account and an idea that they are unpatriotic or, even, anti-patriotic. Perhaps now they are finding a voice again. At all events, as I suggested in that post, it’s not sustainable for a country to simply dismiss half its population, and the younger, more educated half at that, as an irrelevance.
Redefining patriotism
That’s not to say that the football rows line up leavers and remainers for, as it were, a cultural penalty shoot-out (for one thing, it won’t have such a decisive outcome). The lines are much less clearly drawn than that. But they do involve an adjacent set of distinctions between mono- and multi-culturalism, exclusivity and inclusivity, insularity and openness, and between simplistic and complex understandings of history, culture and nationhood. Football is a potent terrain for that because these rows are about the national team (of England), and so deny the fault-line as being between patriots and non-patriots, or between those who ‘love the country’ versus ‘those who would talk it down’. Rather, and quite starkly, the fault-line becomes between two competing versions of what the country is, of whose country it is, and of what patriotism means.
During the referendum (and, in fact, for years before) a common expression, or complaint, amongst pro-Brexit people was ‘I just want my country back’. That was often code for hostility to immigration, but it also referenced a wider set of actual or perceived lost stabilities. With Brexit, though it seems hardly to have diminished the complaint (since it is an essentially unsatisfiable desire), they have got their country back. But it was an expression which was predicated on other people losing their country as, with Brexit, many felt they did, and those people are still, for the most part, here. There was, literally, no possibility of reversing time so as to ‘get back’ something which, even if it had ever existed, no longer did so, and couldn’t be voted into being. In fact, to the extent it was a promise of Brexit, it was another of the false promises of Brexit.
Challenging inverted snobbery
As well as breaking through the false division of the patriotic and the unpatriotic, the football rows are significant in breaking the associated attempt of populist inverted snobbery to draw an essential divide between ‘ordinary’ working-class people and the supposedly sneering, university-educated middle-class.
That is an inadequate way of understanding the Brexit vote, as for example research on ‘comfortable leavers’ shows. It is also, ironically, a hugely patronizing and stereotypical view of class and of region, in which the ‘people up north’ are imagined as pigeon-fancying, leave-voting, terrace house dwellers who have never been to university and enjoy nothing more than a pint of wallop, whilst liberal metropolitan remain-voting southerners sit around sipping Sancerre and discussing Derrida with the au pair in their Tuscan holiday homes.
Needless to say, many of the most earnest of these heroic culture warriors are, in fact, well-heeled, London-based graduates but ‘will have you know’ that their grandfather on their mother’s side was a coal miner which, by some mysterious process of genetic and historical osmosis, makes them the voice of the people. It sometimes seems as if their politics is a decades-long reaction to the excitement of hearing Pulp’s Common People played at a JCR disco in 1995.
In any case, it manifestly falls apart when it involves positioning footballers like Marcus Rashford - who actively and effectively campaigned for free school meals drawing on his own childhood experiences of poverty in Manchester, and is an inspirational role model to people of all kinds of backgrounds and ages - as out of touch or engaged in ‘gesture politics’.
The role of masculinity?
There’s perhaps also something to be said about masculinity in all this, although it is hard to pin down. The Brexit vote was evenly split in terms of gender, but there’s an undercurrent of macho bravado about ‘going it alone’ and in the associated culture war attack on ‘remoaners’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘cry babies’, as well as a definite sense amongst some lockdown sceptics of ‘masks being for wimps’.
Even harder to pin down, but discernible I think, is an implicit idea of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ of whatever gender as being effete, and the ‘authentic working class’ of whatever gender as being rugged and earthy. Again, it’s hard to position professional footballers as effete wimps, so the polarizing dyads of the culture war work less effectively here as well.
Within this there is an interesting and subtle twist. Because in some ways these footballers are re-writing traditional machismo, including that associated with football, in the way they emphasise cooperation and solidarity. Apart from the conduct of the team during the tournament, that was evident in the support Rashford gave to another fine British sporting talent, the tennis player Emma Raducanu.
Radacunu, whose Canadian-Chinese-Romanian background itself bespeaks of a multi-cultural Britain, whilst making her a target for social media mutterings that she’s not ‘really’ British, had had to withdraw from Wimbledon suffering what appeared to be an anxiety attack. She should take advice on how to “toughen up”, opined Piers Morgan; “you should be proud of yourself”, said Rashford.
A new conversation?
So in just the same way as the referendum vote became, even if it was unexpected and unplanned that it should be so, an occasion for redefining national identity, there is a kind of pent-up desire for that process, having been started, to continue. For a while, under the bludgeon of ‘the will of the people’ it couldn’t quite happen, but it has kept trying to attach itself to suitable occasions – the ‘Harry and Meghan’ rows are perhaps an example – and football is the latest and most potent of them.
How long this episode lasts, and how significant it is, remains to be seen. But in some form or another I think the process is certain to continue as regards both England and Britain. That is because not only is the notion of a ‘unified culture’ a myth, but so too is that of a static one. Culture, in its anthropological meanings, isn’t a branch of the heritage industry. It is also – as studies of organizational culture show, but the same is perhaps even more true of national culture – remarkably resistant to ‘top-down’ management of the sort being attempted by the present government through, for example, its efforts to exert control universities, heritage organizations, and the BBC.
Writing on his blog this week, David Allen Green points out that “those who start culture wars can also lose them”, whilst Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu in Byline Times suggest that the football rows may represent a point when the tide turns in Johnson et al.’s culture war. It certainly seems to have impaled GBNews on the inherent contradiction between positioning itself as ‘anti-woke’ yet proclaiming to stand for free speech. But I’m not sure that culture wars ever have a decisive outcome, and it’s worth noting that the usual self-styled ‘contrarians’ have been quick to fight back this week.
That said, to the extent that the current one has its proximate roots in the Brexit vote, it’s significant that, along with and closely linked to educational level, the best predictor of how people voted in 2016 was age. In that sense the electoral success of Johnson’s approach may be rather time-limited - something Conservative strategists are well aware of (£). Equally, that means there are opportunities, especially for the Labour Party, to catch the tide if not of history then of its close cousin, demography.
But, to reiterate, this is not just or mainly about political parties, although they affect and are affected by it. It is a wider matter, not created but exacerbated by Brexit, of identity and belonging. Football is only incidental to that, but primarily because it is popular it offers an arena – after years of talk of ‘the will of the people’ and of ‘enemies of the people’ – to ask what manner of people the English and, if indirectly, the British are.
For some, of course, the connection is of a negative sort in that the whole tournament could be seen as welcome for being nothing to do with Brexit or politics. Or, which may be a different version of the same thing, as showing how the divisions of Brexit could be healed. A few suggested that England’s success represented a triumph of Brexit. Others thought that Gareth Southgate, in particular, and his team in general, articulated and embodied a new progressive patriotism that was at odds with Brexit. Some in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland may have wondered what a Number 10 decked out with St George’s flags had to do with them.
Then came the post-tournament fall-out over taking the knee, booing taking the knee (and the condemning or condoning of that), the thuggery of some supporters, the racist attacks on England’s black footballers, and their and others’ responses to it. Unavoidably, this is about politics. Unavoidably, too, it is an aspect of the culture wars that have been simmering over Brexit itself as well as over racism, the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, ‘woke’ and ‘anti-woke’ politics, and, at the most generic level, over the (different) questions of what it now means to be English and of what it now means to be British.
A nation not at ease with itself
There can never be a single answer to such questions. The idea of a ‘united’ country is necessarily a somewhat absurd one, all the more so when, as with the UK, it is made up of more than one country. National cultures are just too complex and heterogenous to be capturable in any one way, and attempts to make them so are likely to be unpleasantly totalitarian and, even then, not to be fully realized. For that matter, the received image that World War Two Britain saw ‘everyone pulling together for the common good’ is somewhat misleading, as can be seen from the many published Mass Observation diaries, as well as the work of historians like Angus Calder.
Even so, there has been a palpable sense during the Brexit years of Britain as a country more than usually riven, and more than usually divided over both its understanding of its own past and its present-day meaning, let alone its future direction. It has become a cliché that whereas the 2012 London Olympics seemed to present a country that had some comfort with itself, Brexit slammed into that like a wrecking ball. So whilst the notion of a ‘nation at ease with itself’ is a rather illusory one, it has been tangible since Brexit that Britain is a nation that isn’t at ease with itself.
Some of that is to do with race and ethnicity. Manifestly Britain isn’t the only country where that is so, so it would be lazy to ascribe everything to Brexit. It is also lazy to explain Brexit solely, or even necessarily mainly, in terms of anti-immigration sentiment - but it would be entirely dishonest to deny it having been a significant driver. For all that some Brexiters may have disowned it, they were content to profit from, for example, the UKIP “Breaking Point” poster.
Certainly the promise to end freedom of movement of people was a major factor in the vote to leave, and also a decisive one in the subsequent decision that that meant leaving the single market. And the post-Brexit culture war has been very much conducted on the terrain of ‘cracking down’ on asylum seekers and of controlling immigration (though both of these pre-date Brexit) as well as things like the battles over statues with associations with slavery and colonialism.
But that culture war has other fronts as well. Examples include ongoing skirmishes over ‘cancel culture’ and freedom of speech. In particular, there are remarkably strong connections and overlaps between Brexit and anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown and anti-mask positions. That may be less of a cleavage between leave and remain voters, but is fairly clear at the level of the high-profile Brexiter leaders in politics and the media – Farage being the most obvious example, and the links between the ERG and the ‘Covid Recovery Group’ of Tory MPs being another.
Johnson’s vulnerability
Within all this, Boris Johnson has clearly been an important figure but in a rather peculiar way. Despite fronting the Vote Leave campaign, his commitment to Brexit was never very deep or genuine and, as is well-known, he nearly backed remain. Covid forced him into backing restrictions which, undoubtedly, he would have opposed had he not been Prime Minister, and his antipathy to them explains why he was always late to adopt them and usually gives the impression that he doesn’t fully support them.
Crucially, it is clearly the case that fomenting the culture war has been part of a deliberate strategy developed by senior government advisers (£) who see it as central to holding together Johnson’s electoral coalition. It is this strategy which has now caught him out – especially in refusing to condemn the booing of knee-taking and then, with wearying inevitability, lying about it – in the same way as it has caught out Priti Patel.
It remains to be seen how this now plays out, but Johnson’s particular vulnerability is the naked opportunism of his desire for popularity, which makes charges of hypocrisy easy and, therefore, public conviction on those charges an ever-present possibility, especially now that it brings him into conflict with the likeable, gifted, articulate and extremely popular English football stars. If nothing else, it exposes the difference between ‘popular’ and ‘populist’, something which some Tories are now realizing and which the Labour Party has begun to explore.
2016: the national conversation we didn’t know we were having
Johnson’s fate isn’t, however, the main issue in the football rows. What is more important, I think, is that they show an appetite for a ‘national conversation’ (whatever that might actually mean) about ‘what kind of country’ – or, rather, countries - we are which challenges the apparent victory of the Brexiter narrative of ‘the people’. The latter didn’t happen as the result of such a national conversation but emerged, almost accidentally, as the result of a sort of smash and grab raid because, at the time of the referendum, few people quite understood what was going on (I certainly didn’t).
That was perhaps because the general assumption, on all sides, was that remain would win. So we didn’t really know that we weren’t just deciding whether or not to leave the EU but were engaged in something which was about to shape the entirety of what ‘we’ – the United Kingdom, England – meant, both for ourselves and for how we are seen abroad. (A recent example of the latter is German journalist Annette Dittert’s evisceration of Johnson’s regime.)
So, in a way which wouldn’t have been the case had remain won, literally overnight a radical alteration occurred in the terrain and texture of politics. Very soon it became clear that the Brexit process wasn’t going to be just one of ‘technical’ adjustments but would be a battle for Britain’s ‘political soul’. With that, it emerged, as I wrote a few weeks ago, that Brexit had, in effect, ‘cancelled’ half the population as being of no account and an idea that they are unpatriotic or, even, anti-patriotic. Perhaps now they are finding a voice again. At all events, as I suggested in that post, it’s not sustainable for a country to simply dismiss half its population, and the younger, more educated half at that, as an irrelevance.
Redefining patriotism
That’s not to say that the football rows line up leavers and remainers for, as it were, a cultural penalty shoot-out (for one thing, it won’t have such a decisive outcome). The lines are much less clearly drawn than that. But they do involve an adjacent set of distinctions between mono- and multi-culturalism, exclusivity and inclusivity, insularity and openness, and between simplistic and complex understandings of history, culture and nationhood. Football is a potent terrain for that because these rows are about the national team (of England), and so deny the fault-line as being between patriots and non-patriots, or between those who ‘love the country’ versus ‘those who would talk it down’. Rather, and quite starkly, the fault-line becomes between two competing versions of what the country is, of whose country it is, and of what patriotism means.
During the referendum (and, in fact, for years before) a common expression, or complaint, amongst pro-Brexit people was ‘I just want my country back’. That was often code for hostility to immigration, but it also referenced a wider set of actual or perceived lost stabilities. With Brexit, though it seems hardly to have diminished the complaint (since it is an essentially unsatisfiable desire), they have got their country back. But it was an expression which was predicated on other people losing their country as, with Brexit, many felt they did, and those people are still, for the most part, here. There was, literally, no possibility of reversing time so as to ‘get back’ something which, even if it had ever existed, no longer did so, and couldn’t be voted into being. In fact, to the extent it was a promise of Brexit, it was another of the false promises of Brexit.
Challenging inverted snobbery
As well as breaking through the false division of the patriotic and the unpatriotic, the football rows are significant in breaking the associated attempt of populist inverted snobbery to draw an essential divide between ‘ordinary’ working-class people and the supposedly sneering, university-educated middle-class.
That is an inadequate way of understanding the Brexit vote, as for example research on ‘comfortable leavers’ shows. It is also, ironically, a hugely patronizing and stereotypical view of class and of region, in which the ‘people up north’ are imagined as pigeon-fancying, leave-voting, terrace house dwellers who have never been to university and enjoy nothing more than a pint of wallop, whilst liberal metropolitan remain-voting southerners sit around sipping Sancerre and discussing Derrida with the au pair in their Tuscan holiday homes.
Needless to say, many of the most earnest of these heroic culture warriors are, in fact, well-heeled, London-based graduates but ‘will have you know’ that their grandfather on their mother’s side was a coal miner which, by some mysterious process of genetic and historical osmosis, makes them the voice of the people. It sometimes seems as if their politics is a decades-long reaction to the excitement of hearing Pulp’s Common People played at a JCR disco in 1995.
In any case, it manifestly falls apart when it involves positioning footballers like Marcus Rashford - who actively and effectively campaigned for free school meals drawing on his own childhood experiences of poverty in Manchester, and is an inspirational role model to people of all kinds of backgrounds and ages - as out of touch or engaged in ‘gesture politics’.
The role of masculinity?
There’s perhaps also something to be said about masculinity in all this, although it is hard to pin down. The Brexit vote was evenly split in terms of gender, but there’s an undercurrent of macho bravado about ‘going it alone’ and in the associated culture war attack on ‘remoaners’, ‘snowflakes’ and ‘cry babies’, as well as a definite sense amongst some lockdown sceptics of ‘masks being for wimps’.
Even harder to pin down, but discernible I think, is an implicit idea of the ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ of whatever gender as being effete, and the ‘authentic working class’ of whatever gender as being rugged and earthy. Again, it’s hard to position professional footballers as effete wimps, so the polarizing dyads of the culture war work less effectively here as well.
Within this there is an interesting and subtle twist. Because in some ways these footballers are re-writing traditional machismo, including that associated with football, in the way they emphasise cooperation and solidarity. Apart from the conduct of the team during the tournament, that was evident in the support Rashford gave to another fine British sporting talent, the tennis player Emma Raducanu.
Radacunu, whose Canadian-Chinese-Romanian background itself bespeaks of a multi-cultural Britain, whilst making her a target for social media mutterings that she’s not ‘really’ British, had had to withdraw from Wimbledon suffering what appeared to be an anxiety attack. She should take advice on how to “toughen up”, opined Piers Morgan; “you should be proud of yourself”, said Rashford.
A new conversation?
So in just the same way as the referendum vote became, even if it was unexpected and unplanned that it should be so, an occasion for redefining national identity, there is a kind of pent-up desire for that process, having been started, to continue. For a while, under the bludgeon of ‘the will of the people’ it couldn’t quite happen, but it has kept trying to attach itself to suitable occasions – the ‘Harry and Meghan’ rows are perhaps an example – and football is the latest and most potent of them.
How long this episode lasts, and how significant it is, remains to be seen. But in some form or another I think the process is certain to continue as regards both England and Britain. That is because not only is the notion of a ‘unified culture’ a myth, but so too is that of a static one. Culture, in its anthropological meanings, isn’t a branch of the heritage industry. It is also – as studies of organizational culture show, but the same is perhaps even more true of national culture – remarkably resistant to ‘top-down’ management of the sort being attempted by the present government through, for example, its efforts to exert control universities, heritage organizations, and the BBC.
Writing on his blog this week, David Allen Green points out that “those who start culture wars can also lose them”, whilst Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu in Byline Times suggest that the football rows may represent a point when the tide turns in Johnson et al.’s culture war. It certainly seems to have impaled GBNews on the inherent contradiction between positioning itself as ‘anti-woke’ yet proclaiming to stand for free speech. But I’m not sure that culture wars ever have a decisive outcome, and it’s worth noting that the usual self-styled ‘contrarians’ have been quick to fight back this week.
That said, to the extent that the current one has its proximate roots in the Brexit vote, it’s significant that, along with and closely linked to educational level, the best predictor of how people voted in 2016 was age. In that sense the electoral success of Johnson’s approach may be rather time-limited - something Conservative strategists are well aware of (£). Equally, that means there are opportunities, especially for the Labour Party, to catch the tide if not of history then of its close cousin, demography.
But, to reiterate, this is not just or mainly about political parties, although they affect and are affected by it. It is a wider matter, not created but exacerbated by Brexit, of identity and belonging. Football is only incidental to that, but primarily because it is popular it offers an arena – after years of talk of ‘the will of the people’ and of ‘enemies of the people’ – to ask what manner of people the English and, if indirectly, the British are.
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