What Britain won’t face
Covering British politics today is to be trapped somewhere between despair, horror, outrage and intrigue. We have been in this position for ten years, rotating our cast of premiers, each thrust into the same tempest, each unable to calm it. Perhaps this is nothing new, even if it seems more intense. In 1980, the soon to be leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, noted how susceptible the House of Commons was to “those swelling tempers when it converts itself into a mob”. It has been hard not to think of Foot’s insight as Keir Starmer became the latest prime minister to find himself clinging to power as another storm swept over Westminster. Parliament, it seems, remains just as Foot described: “The most unforgiving and ungenerous assembly in the world.” Speaking with ministers this week, it has been striking to witness the sense of bemused impotence in the face of what is happening around them.
Yet, for Foot, the greatest politicians do not simply possess enough courage to stand against the parliamentary mob, but are able to comprehend the revolutionary ferment in the country at large. This, after all, is almost always the cause of the agitation within the palace walls. Benjamin Disraeli was one such figure for Foot, “the Good Tory” who stood alone in defending the great working-class cause of Chartism in the 1830s and 1840s when others saw only “riot and disorder”. “Nobody can deny that the Chartists labour under great grievances,” Disraeli declared to overwhelming hostility in 1839. “Look at the House, it has been sitting now for five months,” he continued. “What has it done for the people? Nothing… The government is busy making peers, creating baronets, at the very moment when a social insurrection is at the threshold.”
The parallels with the 1840s – that time of radical unrest, political, economic, social and technological – have already wormed their way into our collective consciousness through the warnings of those such as the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark and that anarcho-prophet of the right, Dominic Cummings. It is certainly difficult to read Disraeli’s lamentation and not be struck by the similarities with today. Since 2016, parliament has been gripped by surging tempers, running this way and that, combining to overwhelm successive governments. Throughout this period, no government managed to achieve much of lasting consequence, bar Brexit itself; each busying itself instead with trivialities as the social turmoil grew. What marked out Disraeli as a man of history, in Foot’s view, was that he had the political imagination to understand the conditions of his revolutionary age – and to grasp that they could not be “skirted or sidestepped” but had to be dealt with head-on. “I have been of the opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded,” as Sidonia ventriloquises for Disraeli in his 1844 novel Coningsby.
Yet, here we are again, trying to avoid the upheaval even as it intensifies beyond our control. Everywhere we look, it is clear – from Ukraine to Iran, Silicon Valley and Taiwan. Back home, the situation is not as world-historic, but forces are in play which are upending much that we have taken for granted in our own politics. But in Westminster, our political class descends ever more farcically into their own intrigue, consumed by that potent combination of fear, sincerity and self-interest as Whitehall grinds to a halt. This past week alone I spoke with ministers who either did not know whether they could – or should – campaign for Andy Burnham, their own parliamentary candidate in the coming by-election, or whether they could – or should – hope for him to suffer such a humiliating comeuppance in his battle to hold off Reform that he could not win the resulting civil war for control of the party. Few believe he can solve the country’s problems.
Having already witnessed the long, painful indignities of the Conservative Party’s implosion, it is now clear that we face the very real prospect of the Labour Party following suit, as rival camps form behind the Prime Minister, his northern challenger and potentially a handful of others. A veteran of similar Tory intrigues assured me recently that there was no prospect of Starmer standing in a leadership contest triggered by Burnham or Streeting. To do so would be an act of such obvious self-harm that it would not happen. Perhaps. And yet I have been assured this is exactly what Starmer intends to do, because he believes he has every right to do so given he led the party in a general election he won only two years ago.
The prospect of this coming battle even seems to have galvanised the Prime Minister after an initial wobble. In parliament, he has appeared more relaxed than usual, as if liberated by the scent of death, “a final flood of colours [that] will live on,” as Clive James wrote of his final months alive. A splurge of initiatives has poured forth from across Whitehall in recent days: tax breaks for family excursions over the summer, free bus rides for children, cuts in tariffs to reduce food costs. Smart politics? Maybe. Coming on the heels of welcome news on economic growth and falling net migration figures, it seems to have given a few wobbling Labour MPs pause for thought. But as the economist Paul Johnson put it, what does it amount to, really? The food subsidies come at a cost of £150m per year. Spread between 30 million households, the average family will save 10p per week.
Westminster has often felt detached from events. Yet I have never experienced such intense whiplash as I have this week, moving between conversations about political sleights of hand and private warnings from those at the highest levels of our national security apparatus about the situation in Ukraine – demanding an adaptation of our own defences that is not forthcoming – as well as those on the front line of the coming AI revolution, who insist with alarmingly certainty that everything in our lives will soon change.
Across Whitehall, the rigid inability to respond to such changes is staggering. Take three examples. It now costs more to build here than in almost any other country in the world. HS2 is expected to cost £100bn – more than Nasa expects to spend establishing a base on the moon and up to ten times more than similar high-speed rail routes cost in Europe. Secondly, it costs us more to borrow here than for almost any of our competitors. In 2020, the UK government paid around 0.5 per cent more on its debt than the French government, but today that gap has risen to nearly 1.5 per cent. Third: it costs us more to power our economy than almost anywhere else. Britain now has the highest industrial energy costs in Europe because we do not produce as much electricity domestically as most other countries and are therefore far more dependent on the import of gas from abroad. We have become a poor country where everything is expensive because we produce so little ourselves.
The effect of this is now obvious. Economic growth has remained weak for almost two decades. For much of the north, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, of course, the economic slump has lasted twice this long. The number of people not in education, employment or training rises and rises, now close to one million, including one in seven of those aged between 16 and 24. Unemployment has risen to 5 per cent. And yet as grim as all this sounds, it is striking how many conversations in Westminster now start with a warning about how dire the situation is about to get because of the stand-off in Iran. One senior figure told me last week that the coming storm could be as bad as the pandemic. Add into this mix the continuing unrest over small-boat crossings, asylum hotels and migration, and it is not hard to see why there is now fearful discussion among even the most sanguine of seen-it-all characters in politics about the prospect of coming social strife in the event of a Reform victory – or indeed a Reform defeat.
In February 1844, Disraeli delivered a speech to the House of Commons on “the Irish Question”, exposing the extent of his radical imagination. What is the Irish Question? “One says it is a physical question, another a spiritual… Now it is the absence of the aristocracy; now the absence of railways. It is the pope one day and potatoes the next… A starving population, an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world.” But given all these competing explanations, most holding some truth, what possible remedy could there be, he asked? “Revolution”, came the answer. And yet, the Irish could not successfully revolt because they were bound to another, more powerful country: England. And so, what conclusion should England draw? “If the connection with England prevented a resolution and a revolution was the only remedy, England logically is in the odious position of being the cause of all the misery of Ireland.”
I have always thought this speech extraordinary: far more radical than almost any given in the House of Commons in my lifetime. And yet, so much of it translates. So perhaps we should be asking: what is the British question? What is the cause of our malaise? Is it physical, our detachment from the Continent and the new Asian heartland of world commerce? Or is it spiritual, a crisis of confidence in ourselves, in our history, our mission, our purpose, our character? Or perhaps the absence of an aristocracy in the classical Aristotelian sense – a capable elite? We certainly seem to have acquired one of the weakest executives in the world. The absence of railways feels a little too on the nose. But the presence of the Pope? Well, no, but the presence of a mad Caesar, yes. And potatoes, no, but oil and gas, yes.
What of the Disraelian remedy: revolution? Are we able to successfully revolt in Britain today? We have tried, it seems, for the past decade, without much effect. For Anthony Barnett, Tom Nairn and the modern-day Chartists, the answer is obvious: it is no longer Ireland’s connection to England, but England’s connection to Britain, that anachronistic prison-state for independent nations in need of liberation from the hubris of caring about the Donbas, Washington or Beijing. Without England the UK would fall apart, freeing Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland too – so goes the argument. I see the merit in it, but why is Britain different in this regard to Spain or France or Germany or Italy? The crisis is simpler and more profound. It is not the UK which is in the odious position of immiserating the people of this country, but the British state managing its affairs.
When Disraeli set his Irish challenge in 1844, he asked what the duty of an English minister should be in such a situation where he held the future of another country in his care. “To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would affect by force,” Disraeli answered. Surely the same is true today. And yet, it is hard to ask this question and not despair. Does the Labour Party – whether under the current Prime Minister or any of his rivals – really have a coherent plan to affect by policy what a revolution would affect by force? Does any party in Britain? Starmer’s incrementalism has so far proved insufficient, but so will Burnham’s “Manchesterism” if it is not quickly developed into something far more profound.
It is sobering to remember that there have only been two significant upheavals in Britain’s political economy in the past century: the first the consequence of war, the second of crisis. The first came in 1945-51 and was the product of the greatest conflagration in world history, which created the conditions for Britain’s social democratic postwar settlement. The second came in the 1980s after a decade of disorder and decades more intellectual opposition to the postwar consensus. When Margaret Thatcher slammed Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty on the table before her colleagues shortly after winning the leadership and declared “this is what we believe”, she was acknowledging the intellectual roots of her programme. Hers was not a revolution which began in 1979, but one that stretched back through the years. Hayek published The Constitution of Liberty in 1960, but created the Mont Pelerin society for free-market economics in 1947, a few years after his masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944.
Where are the equivalent intellectual challenges of the status quo today, or indeed the equivalent Chartist challenge of the 1840s? As one figure put it to me recently, so much of what we hear instead is a kind of lamentation for the lost world before Brexit or before the crash, Iraq and 9/11 – a world of progress and hope, free from the shadow of menacing violence and foreboding that has steadily grown throughout this century.
One problem for both progressive politics and self-styled centrism at the moment is that the closest thing to a radical intellectual challenge to today’s political settlement appears to come from the populist right, not the left. Among the young Faragist Reformers today, their great intellectual lodestar is not Thatcher, but Enoch Powell – the man they now see as their prophet for opposing everything from international law to immigration, Europe and the West’s dependence on America. But who is the left’s?
Farage himself remains something of a Powellite by instinct, if not intellect. Yet he is also too much of a Thatcherite to be able to sit at the head of an intellectual challenge to the governing consensus. He is, at heart, a pre-Maastricht Tory: Edward Leigh with a smartphone, aping Powell’s working-class communing but without the intensity of his reactionary mysticism. Upon arriving in England, Karl Marx described Disraeli’s Tory radicals as “half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past; half menace of the future; at times by its witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core”. Much of the same could be said of Reform.
Yet, beyond that, where is the plan, the programme? It is not there. And where is it from Labour, from Burnham, or Streeting? Is there a plan for a new political economy? It is hard to argue any individual or movement in Britain today has even begun to answer these questions seriously. Even loyal ministers admit the government has no real plan for or analysis about the country’s underlying problems. In mitigation, they now say that no governments ever really do and they must be given the space to “learn on the job”. It is not good enough.
By the time they have come up with some answers, the world will have changed again. I spoke with one figure at the heart of the approaching AI boom who said we were already in another industrial revolution. Where the industrial revolution created abundant power of the sort unimaginable before, this one will create a similarly transformative abundance of intelligence. It is no coincidence that the political tumults of the 1840s, articulated by Disraeli and Marx, came at the culmination of this moment of industrial disruption. We are approaching something similar.
And who has a plan for any of it? To secure abundant cheap energy for British industry to compete; to ensure the British state can deliver something, anything, again; to ensure the country retains some control over its destiny in a world of artificial intelligence created, shaped and owned by oligarchs on the other side of the world? Who even has a plan to maintain the unity of the realm, to assert an idea of Britain that all who live here can call home; an idea that we are prepared to fight for; or for a greater idea of a civilisation to which we belong: Europe, the West, humanity?
It often feels today as though we are back in the tumult of the 1970s and 1980s, that age of Foot and Powell and Thatcher; of clashing ideas and approaching storms. But I wonder if Cummings and Clark are right and we are, in fact, closer to the age of Disraeli and Marx. Today, much like the 1840s, everything is in flux simultaneously: technology, capitalism, religion, democracy. And yet if the revolutions are now underway, who do we have to rise to the level of events? Where is our Disraeli? Where is our Marx? “They knew as little of the real state of their own country as savages of an approaching eclipse,” Disraeli observed in Coningsby of those trapped in their Westminster cage. Who can say with confidence anything has really changed?
[Further reading: Alarm clock Britain: a tale of two deprivations]
