The shock of the EU referendum result prompted outrage and panic within the liberal establishment. Did truth not count any longer? Why had the tabloids been allowed to fan the anti-European flames for so long? Was the economy going to fall off a cliff? In the immediate aftermath of the referendum, there was bewilderment and fear regarding the loss of political stability and the emergence of an apparently kamikaze nationalist force. The entire era of globalisation – cultural and economic – seemed to have come to a sudden halt. Within three weeks of the referendum, Theresa May was installed as the new prime minister, and immediately set out a new type of Conservative programme, ostensibly sympathetic to the sentiments of the ‘left behind’. Apparently, now in the safe hands of the former home secretary, the protective, punitive state was back. For just under a year, cheered to the rafters by the Daily Mail and much of her own party, she sought to channel the passions of Brexit to expand her authority. So high was her confidence by the spring of 2017, that she did the very thing she had promised not to do: call an early election.
Initial Ruptures
It became clear early on in the night of the referendum that Leave had extraordinary levels of support in the North East, taking 70 per cent of the votes in Hartlepool and 61 per cent in Sunderland. It subsequently emerged that Wales had voted for Leave overall, especially strongly in the South around areas such as Newport. It is easy to focus on the recent history of Tory-led austerity when analysing this, as if anger towards elites and immigrants was simply an effect of the public spending cuts of the previous six years or (more structurally) the collapse of Britain’s pre-2007 debt-driven model of growth.
But consider the longer history of these regions as well. They are well recognised as Labour’s historic heartlands, sitting on coalfields and/or around ship-building cities. Indeed, outside of London and Scotland, they were among the only blobs of Labour red on the 2015 electoral map. There is no reason to think that they should not stay red in a future election. But in the language of Marxist geographers, they have had no successful ‘spatial fix’ since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. Thatcherism gutted them with pit closures and monetarism, but generated no private sector jobs to fill the space. The entrepreneurial investment that neoliberals always believe is just around the corner never materialised.
New Labour’s solution was to spread wealth in their direction using fiscal policy: public sector back-office jobs were strategically relocated to South Wales and the North East to alleviate deindustrialisation, while tax credits made low-productivity service work more socially viable. This effectively created a shadow welfare state that was never publicly spoken of, co-existing with a political culture that heaped scorn on dependency. The infamous comment, sometimes attributed to Peter Mandelson, that the Labour heartlands could be depended on to vote Labour no matter what ‘because they’ve got nowhere else to go’, spoke of a dominant attitude. In Nancy Fraser’s terms, New Labour offered ‘redistribution’ but no ‘recognition’.1
This cultural contradiction wasn’t sustainable and nor was the geographic one. Not only was the ‘spatial fix’ relatively short term, seeing as it depended on rising tax receipts from the South East and a centre-left government willing to spread money quite lavishly (albeit discreetly), it also failed to deliver what many of those Brexit voters perhaps crave the most: the dignity of being self-sufficient, not necessarily in a neoliberal sense, but certainly in a communal, familial and fraternal sense.
By the same token, it seems unlikely that voters in these regions (or Cornwall or other economically peripheral spaces) would feel ‘grateful’ to the EU for subsidies. Knowing that your business, farm, family or region is dependent on the beneficence of wealthy liberals is unlikely to be a recipe for satisfaction. More bizarrely, the regions with the closest economic ties to the EU in general (and not just of the subsidised variety) were the most likely to vote Leave. While it may be one thing for an investment banker to understand that they ‘benefit from the EU’ in regulatory terms, it is quite another to encourage poor and culturally marginalised people to feel grateful towards the elites that sustain them through handouts, month by month. Resentment develops not in spite of this generosity, but arguably because of it. This isn’t to discredit what the EU does in terms of redistribution, but pointing to handouts is a psychologically and politically naive basis on which to justify remaining in the EU.
In this context, the Vote Leave campaign slogan ‘take back control’ was a piece of political genius. It worked on every level from the macroeconomic to the psychoanalytic. Think of what it means on an individual level to rediscover control. To be a person without control (for instance to suffer incontinence or a facial tick) is to be the butt of cruel jokes, to be potentially embarrassed in public. It potentially reduces one’s independence. What was so clever about the language of the Leave campaign was that it spoke directly to this feeling of inadequacy and embarrassment, then promised to eradicate it. The promise had nothing to do with economics or policy, but everything to do with the psychological allure of autonomy and self-respect. Nigel Farage’s political strategy was to take seriously communities who’d otherwise been taken for granted for much of the past fifty years.
This doesn’t necessarily have to translate into nationalistic pride or racism (although it might well do), but it does at the very least mean no longer being laughed at. Those who have ever laughed at ‘chavs’ (such as the millionaire stars of Little Britain) have something to answer for right now. The willingness of Nigel Farage to weather the scornful laughter of metropolitan liberals (for instance through his periodic appearances on Have I Got News For You) could equally have made him look brave in the eyes of many potential Leave voters. I can’t help feeling that every smug, liberal, snobbish barb that Ian Hislop threw Farage’s way on that increasingly hateful programme was ensuring that revenge would be all the greater, once it arrived. The giggling, from which Boris Johnson also benefited handsomely, needs to stop.
Brexit reflects a much deeper cultural and political malaise, one that also appears to be driving the rise of Donald Trump in the US. Among people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences. The discovery of the ‘Case Deaton effect’ in the US – unexpectedly high mortality rates among white working classes – is linked to rising alcohol and opiate abuse and to rising suicide rates. It has also been shown to correlate closely to geographic areas with the greatest support for Trump.2 It seems clear that – beyond the rhetoric of ‘Great Britain’ and ‘democracy’ – Brexit was never really articulated as a viable policy, and only ever as a destructive urge, which some no doubt now feel guilty for giving way to.
Thatcher and Reagan rode to power by promising a brighter future, which never quite materialised other than for a minority with access to elite education and capital assets. The contemporary populist promise to make Britain or America ‘great again’ is not made in the same way. It is not a pledge or a policy platform; it’s not to be measured in terms of results. When made by the likes of Boris Johnson, it’s not even clear if it’s meant seriously or not. It’s more an offer of a collective real-time hallucination, that can be indulged in like a video game.
The Remain campaign continued to rely on forecasts, warnings and predictions, in the hope that eventually people would be dissuaded from ‘risking it’. But to those who have given up on the future already, this is all just more political rhetoric. In any case, the entire practice of modelling the future in terms of ‘risk’ has lost credibility, as evidenced by the now terminal decline of opinion polling as a tool for political control.
The failure of ‘facts’
One of the complaints made most frequently by liberal commentators, economists and media pundits was that the referendum campaign was being conducted without regard to ‘truth’. This isn’t quite right. It was conducted without adequate regard to facts. To the great frustration of the Remain campaign, their ‘facts’ never cut through, whereas Leave’s statistics (most famously the £350 million/week price tag of EU membership) were widely accepted.
What is a ‘fact’ exactly? Mary Poovey argues that a new way of organising and perceiving the world came into existence at the end of the fifteenth century with the invention of double-entry book-keeping.3 This new style of knowledge is that of facts, representations that seem both context-independent, but also magically slot seamlessly into multiple contexts as and when they are needed. The basis for this magic is that measures and methodologies (such as accounting techniques) become standardised, but then treated as apolitical, thereby allowing numbers to move around freely in public discourse without difficulty or challenge. In order for this to work, the infrastructure that produces ‘facts’ needs careful policing, ideally through centralisation in the hands of statistics agencies or elite universities (the rise of commercial polling in the 1930s was already a challenge to the authority of ‘facts’ in this respect).
This game has probably been up for some time. As soon as media outlets start making a big deal about the facts of a situation, for instance with ‘fact check’ bulletins, it is clear that numbers have already become politicised. ‘Facts’ (such as statistics) survived as an authoritative basis for public and democratic deliberation for most of the 200 years following the French Revolution. But the politicisation of social sciences, metrics and policy administration means that the ‘facts’ produced by official statistical agencies must now compete with other conflicting ‘facts’. The deconstruction of ‘facts’ has been partly pushed by varieties of postmodern theory since the 1960s, but it is also an inevitable effect of the attempt (beloved of New Labour) to turn policy into a purely scientific exercise.
The attempt to reduce politics to a utilitarian science (most often, to neoclassical economics) eventually backfires, once the science in question then starts to become politicised. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is now far too long in the tooth to be treated entirely credulously, and people tacitly understand that it often involves a lot of ‘policy-based evidence’. When the Remain camp appealed to their ‘facts’, forecasts and models, they hoped that these would be judged to be outside of the fray of politics. More absurdly, they seemed to imagine that the opinions of bodies such as the IMF might be viewed as ‘independent’. Economics has been such a crucial prop for political authority over the past thirty-five years that it is now anything but outside of the fray of politics.
In place of facts, we now live in a world of data. Instead of trusted measures and methodologies being used to produce numbers, a dizzying array of numbers is produced by default, to be mined, visualised, analysed and interpreted however we wish. If risk modelling (using notions of statistical normality) was the defining research technique of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sentiment analysis is the defining one of the emerging digital era. We no longer have stable, ‘factual’ representations of the world, but unprecedented new capacities to sense and monitor what is bubbling up where, who’s feeling what, what’s the general vibe.
Financial markets are themselves far more like tools of sentiment analysis (representing the mood of investors) than producers of ‘facts’. This is why it was so absurd to look to currency markets and spread-betters for the truth of what would happen in the referendum: they could only give a sense of what certain people felt would happen in the referendum at certain times. Given the absence of any trustworthy facts (in the form of polls), they could then only provide a sense of how investors felt about Britain’s national mood: a sentiment regarding a sentiment. As the 23 June 2016 turned into 24 June, it became manifestly clear that prediction markets are little more than an aggregative representation of the same feelings and moods that one might otherwise detect via Twitter. They’re not in the business of truth-telling, but of mood-tracking.
What Sort of Crisis Is This?
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 was an emergency. This was manifest in its rapid pace and the threat that it might spread exponentially, just like a fire. While the warning signs had been present for over a year prior to the collapse of Lehmans, the emergency occurred over a series of hours, and demanded an immediate policy response. The state acted as a fire brigade on the basis that the emergency would otherwise have spiralled out of control. The fact that the financial crisis may have cost a sum of money comparable to a world war does not mean the rescue wasn’t worth it, if the alternative was total social meltdown.
Brexit has a completely different rhythm, which is why comparisons to Lehmans don’t reveal very much. The weirdest thing about the week following the referendum has been the eerie sense of waiting for something to happen, the collapse of sterling notwithstanding. All that’s happened so far is pretty much exactly what experts and policymakers predicted, whereas the experts were temporarily stumped during September 2008. Investors aren’t panicking right now, they’re simply responding as everyone said they would. It’s the long-term future that is much more worrying. If Lehmans was a housefire (which was spreading), this is more like someone choosing to buy a house that the surveyor has found to be suffering long-term subsidence, but going ahead with the purchase anyway. Not only do the emergency services not care, they can’t help you anyway. Meanwhile your insurance company (who you never liked in the first place) told you repeatedly they couldn’t underwrite it.
Where they are framed as such, emergencies can be used to entrench the status quo even more firmly, making a situation more reliant on existing powers rather than less. This is clearly what happened with neoliberalism from 2008 onwards: states and banks benefited from the ultra-fast pace of economic meltdown in being able to implement measures (often with little deliberation, sometimes overnight or over weekends) that would rescue the status quo. Hence, states successfully sustained the flawed model of capitalism which privileged the financial sector for another eight years, while pushing the costs elsewhere. But Brexit is a crisis of the state first and foremost. This makes it slower but ultimately far more transformative and frightening.
The question is, what is the relation between the economic crisis of 2008 and the political one of 2016, and why the delay between the two? The first thing to note is that the ‘emergency’ of 2008 was never allowed to become a proper crisis, in the sense of a turning point or conclusive judgement. It was bad and scary, but in rescuing the situation, policymakers ensured that nothing would fundamentally change. Crucially, the nature of the rescue (and subsequent policies such as negative interest rates, austerity measures, national bailout and quantitative easing) meant that debt obligations were upheld at all costs. Rather than learn from the mistakes of the past and start afresh (through debt write-offs and bankruptcies) in a different direction, this absolutist respect for debts means that the power relations of the past (between creditor and debtor) are sustained and exacerbated. To insist on the sanctity of debt obligations is a way of ensuring that politics and economics are safely insulated from one another, thereby ensuring that an economic disaster avoids becoming a fully fledged crisis. This insulation was time-limited: in the UK, it turns out to have lasted eight years.
Given that the post-2008 regime of regulation, corporate governance and growth was roughly the same as the pre-2008 one, it should always have been clear that 2008 would be the first ‘prong’ of a two-pronged crisis. Most critical observers suspected that the second ‘prong’ would be similar to the first: another collapse in the credibility of financial derivatives, only this time without the same possibilities for a sovereign rescue. That would necessarily have produced far-reaching political change, for the simple reason that another rescue of the status quo wouldn’t have been viable.
Instead, crisis has emanated from outside of the financial sector altogether, from democracy itself. For Britain, June 2016 might provide the full-stop at the end of a paragraph that began with September 2008 (or arguably a year earlier with Northern Rock). Historians may well look at Lehmans and Brexit as entangled with each other in various ways, but the exact causal connections between the first and second ‘prongs’ of the capitalist crisis are far from clear. What I think we can say instead is that both are consequences of the rise of finance from the 1980s onwards.
The term ‘financialisation’ refers to various processes whereby the logic of finance permeates the non-financial economy and society. All manner of economic and non-economic entities (such as higher education and homes) become valued in terms of their capacity to earn future returns on investment. Giovanni Arrighi argued that all phases of national capitalist expansion eventually reach their peak, then experience a compensatory wave of financial expansion as they go into decline.4 This grants a national economic power a few more years of wealth accumulation, but on the basis of shifting paper around and mediating financial agreements, rather than producing things of any use. This is a case of buying time.5
The rampant expansion of Britain’s financial sector from the 1980s onwards did exactly this, drawing money towards London (and to some extent the UK), but only on the basis that this is where money is made and traded, rather than because of productive activity. Hence, combating inflation and protecting sterling (that is, demonstrating respect for money as a good in itself ) were the pivotal instruments of British industrial policy from Thatcher through to Cameron. That ended last Thursday.
Buying a few more years of prosperity via the financial sector carries severe social costs. In particular, it produces some very awkward cultural and political divisions. These never quite resemble traditional class divisions, as between ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’ (where the former exploits the labour power of the latter). Instead, those who happen to own assets (often thanks to family inheritance) do vastly better than those that don’t. Where they choose to leverage these assets to buy more assets, then their advantages can grow exponentially. What begins with a slice of luck can rapidly snowball into a new rentier class (the ‘1 per cent’).6 The liberal attempt to anchor economic inequalities in differences in ‘merit’ or ‘talent’ or ‘effort’ comes under greater and greater strain, until eventually it loses credibility altogether. The market loses its status as a ‘level playing field’, producing an ideological crisis.
Furthermore, it produces a sense of intergenerational conflict that is equally difficult to crowbar into traditional class divisions. Certain individuals now seem hugely privileged, simply by virtue of being born between 1940 and 1970, while subsequent generations seem to do progressively worse. The current focus on ‘generations’ imposes sharp dividing lines of the sort that market researchers tend to like (such as ‘baby-boomers’ against ‘millennials’), but exaggerates the binary nature of the politics. Underneath this is steady asset price inflation, year on year, and declining social provision, both enabled by the steady expansion of credit in circulation. In the UK, it becomes less economically fortunate to be born with each year that passes.
While the underlying inequalities wrought by finance may not fall neatly into binary oppositions, they seem to have influenced the politics of Remain versus Leave in certain ways. Leave voters consisted roughly of those who have already accumulated assets over their lives plus some who are unlikely to ever do so. Remain voters consisted of those who still feel (for whatever reason) that they could make financialisation work for them, either because they’re young or because they’re still benefiting from asset appreciation. To put that another way, many of the first group would view money as debt (closing down the future) while many of the latter would view it as credit (opening it up). Throw educational inequalities into this financial mix, and you get some stark political and cultural divisions.
The culture wars have entered British politics in dramatic fashion. As in the US, the divide can also be approximately traced in terms of those with a university degree versus those without one. Statistically speaking, having a university degree makes one more likely to be supportive of immigration and membership of the European Union. Those with a degree live lives that are further-reaching in geography and opportunity, lives that are broader in cultural and economic scope. The situation in America is clearly highly charged right now, but it can at least be seen in terms of a trajectory that started with Nixon, gained momentum with Roe v Wade and was then seized as a conscious political strategy by the Republican Party the whole way through to the madness of Donald Trump.
The shock of Brexit is partly in the discovery that this has crept up on us. Unlike America, Britain has always known that it is a class society. It speaks openly of class, makes jokes about class, judges people in terms of class. But our assumptions about class are sorely anachronistic, and don’t reflect the post-’68 culture wars. We still have a major political party called the Labour Party. We can cope with the idea of some people being aristocrats and others being proles; at least we have a language to represent it. But the real inequalities and conflicts of post-1970s Britain, determined by a combination of finance and educational differences, have been papered over by national tradition and media ignorance. They were concealed brilliantly by the Blairite triangulation, and simply bubbled away in the background as a result.
In the US, the culture wars became reflected in the party system. Broadly speaking, the Republican Party came to represent those who felt threatened by the new freedoms of the 1960s, while the Democratic Party stood for those who felt emancipated by them. Naturally, there are some curious coalitions (the Democrats combining Wall Street with most ethnic minorities, and so on) but they have some underlying coherence. This produces a horribly aggressive politics, but it at least means representative democracy sits on top of some real sociological divides.
In the UK, the referendum on Europe was arguably the first time since the 1970s that this primal sociological divide attained any explicit democratic visibility. It took us by surprise, and showed quite how unrepresentative the delineation of ‘Labour’ and ‘Conservative’ had become, in comparison to the cultural and socio-economic divides revealed by the referendum. New Labour’s insistence that half of the population (why half, exactly?) should go to university could have been a warning bell. The division between Leave and Remain has a kind of sociological weightiness that renders the familiar, comforting visions of Labour versus Tory a little superficial by comparison. Moreover, that Leave/Remain divide cuts the parties straight down the middle, rendering them both seemingly unsustainable right now.
As the chaotic dual-party leadership battles are demonstrating, Brexit already appears to be shrinking the quantity of centralised political power in the UK. For libertarians or revolutionary Marxists (enthusiastic Leave voters) this is a welcome outcome, and these intellectuals might be able to mount a coherent case for Brexit on that basis. If that were the only source of historic transformation, then it might be as much exciting as worrying. But what happens when an emergency hits in this context of crisis? This is what the intellectuals (such as Dominic Cummings) on the Leave side are completely ignoring. The justification for Brexit might just withstand the various costs that were predictable, such as a run on sterling and the loss of regional or science funding. But when an unpredictable shock occurs, we will discover what kind of political economy we are now living with and seeking security from.
The source of the emergency could be anything, but it is surely likely to be either another financial shock or a major security event. Were either of these two things to happen, the loss of political power delivered by Brexit would produce far higher levels of panic, and far greater flight towards informal and cultural sources of security: fascism and local violence. We’ve already witnessed the rise of public racism and harassment on Britain’s streets since 23 June, and that’s without anything yet fundamentally changing. As it becomes clear that the state’s capacity to provide security (social, economic, physical) is shrinking, especially in areas where fiscal policy and EU funds were key to social cohesion, then things are likely to get worse.
Avoiding such an emergency may be crucial to how Brexit turns out. The longer we go without one, the easier it will be to absorb if and when it arrives. Anything the state could do in the meantime to guarantee equal security for all UK residents and to rule out deportations would be welcome, which makes the silence of the Home Secretary Theresa May all the more appalling. Some sort of ‘Lexit’ strategy might even become plausible if a period of relative peace is long enough, though it seems even less thought-through than Brexit itself. An emergency is bound to come at some point, indeed the worry must be that Brexit heightens the chance of it occurring, as existing techniques of government and prevention are buffeted by uncertainties and further austerity. Talk of fascism, violence and panic may feel overwrought right now. But to assume these things begin in the same dramatic fashion with which they end is to fall into the trap of understanding history only in retrospect.
The Eurosceptic Imaginary
Given that Brexit was an event imagined and delivered from within the Conservative Party, it is worth reflecting on the longer history of Conservative Euroscepticism, dating back to the early 1990s. Firstly, the political plausibility of Brexit increased as a direct response to Tony Blair’s dogmatic assumption that European integration was a historical destiny, which encompassed the UK. No doubt a figure such as Blair would have discovered a messianic agenda under any historical circumstances. But given that he gained power specifically in the mid-’90s, he was one palpable victim of the fin de siècle ideology (stereotyped by Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, but also present in Anthony Giddens’s ‘Third Way’) that the world was programmed to converge around a single political system.
Neoconservative faith in violent ‘democratisation’ was Blair’s worst indulgence on this front, but a view of European unification (and expansion) as inevitable was partially responsible for inciting the Tory reaction within Westminster. Europe could have been viewed as a particular historical path, adopted in view of the particular awfulness of the European twentieth century. Instead, in a Hegelian fashion, the idea of Europe became entangled with the idea of ‘globalisation’, and the conservative reaction was to refuse both.
Secondly, Tory Brexiteers view the EU as an anti-market project which blocks economic freedom. This is weirdly ahistorical. Firstly, the EU was established specifically to entrench the market as the organising principle of European coordination, as a way of preventing further war between France and Germany. When the left complains that the EU is a ‘neoliberal’ institution that elevates the market above national democracy, this is correct. The left should recognise that, in terms of its foundational goal, it’s been remarkably successful.
Of course, it achieves the single market through a high level of bureaucratic and technocratic planning (such as anti-trust, standardisation, consumer protection), allowing it to be represented as ‘socialist’ by those who cling to a Victorian or anarchic idea of what the market should look like. But there is no contradiction between technocracy and market competition, indeed the latter has depended on the former ever since the rise of business corporations and market regulation in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
One of the many illusions on which Brexit is based, therefore, is that capitalism is a system that works in the spaces outside of regulation, and that regulation is consequently anti-capitalist. A more realistic view is that capitalism is regulation (of working life, product standardisation, consumer choice, of markets, credit and so on), regulation that has always depended on the state – tacitly in the pre-1870 era, but explicitly ever since. The idea that, say, pharmaceuticals, financial services or business services (all areas of some lingering success for the UK) thrive in the absence of rules is to ignore the myriad ways in which it is only rules which make such industries possible in the first place. Moreover, the idea that markets can straddle multiple national jurisdictions without additional technocratic management is yet more magical thinking.
Paraphrasing Stalin, the utopia of Brexit might best be summed up as that of ‘Liberalism in One Country’. The ideal is a laissez-faire of the mid-nineteenth century variety, which either destroys or disregards the ways in which this is no longer realistic. It also involves disregarding the sense in which Victorian laissez-faire was never Liberalism in One Country in the first place, but depended on empire and slavery. Brexit is therefore fuelled by a combination of destructive and fantastical urges: aspects of capitalism which resist the ideal of Victorian laissez-faire must either be got rid of (such as EU membership itself ) or simply ignored. The critical question is which aspects of contemporary British capitalism fall into the former camp, and which will fall into the latter.
Overshooting the mark
Brexit represents a reaction against various models and aspects of liberalism. ‘Lexit’ is promoted as a route out of neoliberalism. Conservative campaigners for Leave were reacting partly against the calculated advice and predictions of elite economists and business leaders that Brexit would lead to recession and long-term decline. Most significantly, perhaps, Brexit was represented as a rejection of international multiculturalism and a reassertion of national difference.
All of these are refusals of dominant orthodoxies, with various histories. Lexiteers want to overturn the dominant policy orthodoxy of the past forty years, presumably so as to return to a more democratic capitalism or socialism. Leave campaigners were rejecting the dominant elite faith in economics, statistics and ‘facts’ that was a rising feature of politics over the twentieth century. And UKIP were demanding a radical re-localisation of law, human rights and labour markets, so as to privilege indigenous entitlements.
The fear is that, in targeting these various aspects of liberalism, some of which are relatively recent, Brexiteers have hugely overshot the mark; they have also turned the tide on one of the most basic principles of political economy: that prosperity is achieved through greater social and spatial interconnectedness. In seeking to overthrow the policies and developments of recent decades, they’ve shot a hole in a programme that dates the whole way back to Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. Despite the fact that few of our politicians (and even fewer of our civil servants) want this, Britain is about to adopt a strategy of national mercantilism that Smith was seeking to dissuade rulers from in 1776.
To put this another way, Brexit will result in a form of protectionism for the UK, whether it wants it or not. Protectionism can, of course, yield economic benefits and has been adopted by most rising industrial powers at key strategic junctures. It exists today, for example, in the way the United States pushes aggressive intellectual property rights in order to protect Hollywood. It helps rapidly developing and industrialising nations catch up with others. But in order to make any sense at all, there has to be something worth protecting. What does Britain have? Michael Porter’s 1990 Competitive Advantage of Nations includes a bleak table on areas of world-leading national strategic advantage. USA: software, entertainment industries, micro-processors. Germany: machine tools, cars. Britain? Finance and biscuits. Like a dog refusing to give up its stick, we’ve staked our national pride on clinging onto things that nobody else much wants.
Two possible futures present themselves, one of which is socially regressive, the other of which is fantastical. The socially regressive one is that Britain regains a form of competitiveness by slashing taxes on mobile capital and social protections, such as the minimum wage, as has already been mooted by various Tories. This still seems likely to me, which makes Theresa May’s surprisingly social democratic leadership platform another likely example of post-truth politics in action (there is no manifesto or other mechanism to hold her to any of her ideas, and it is difficult to see them surviving a recession). This achieves Liberalism in One Country by diving headlong into the past.
The second is the Steve Hilton and Dominic Cummings fantasy in which Britain hurls itself into some technologically expansive, anarchic, cyber-utopian future. Britain becomes a kind of experiment in new fusions of technology, science, policy and regulation, driven by entrepreneurs whose main ambition is to destroy the status quo. It revels in a post-truth landscape, busting the cartel of established scientific and business centres. According to this ideology, the only way to discover the new is to forcefully abandon the old, no matter how many accepted truths or values are lost along the way. Smashing up the nation state is the first step towards smashing up vested interests in business, universities and cultural production. This is the vision of the ‘outer right’ – libertarian ideologists weaned on third-hand versions of Nietzsche and Schumpeter – who are quite content to view a nation as a laboratory to mess around in.
The key question is what happens when these various ideals collide with the reality of British capitalist society in the twenty-first century. The immediate fall-out has been ugly: a 500 per cent rise in reported racial hate crime, British researchers being dumped from European research projects, and early signs of economic decline. But how might ‘Liberalism in One Nation’ work in real sociological terms? I think we can envisage it playing out differently in three strata of economic activity and social class.
Firstly, there are the businesses which lined up against Brexit, because they trade with Europe, value steady and generally reasonable market rules, and don’t want politics to interfere with their investment strategies. The national ‘home’ of these businesses is often irrelevant, other than for tax purposes, and their place in Britain is often via foreign direct investment. It is difficult to imagine any aspect of Brexit that benefits these businesses. From the perspective of a multinational corporation, far from overthrowing the ‘burden of red tape’ (as Brexiteers believe), Britain is now in the process of building a new wall of inefficiency around itself.
In economic jargon, the ‘transaction costs’ of locating in and doing business with Britain will rise permanently as a result of Brexit. Regulatory inefficiencies benefit one class of business only: the intermediaries and consultants who sell services in managing these transaction costs (a ‘Brexit management industry’ is surely going to arise, just like a minister for Brexit).7 International capital will be greatly inconvenienced by Brexit, but that simply means that less of it will travel to or via Britain in the future. Global capitalism is fast and complex. By comparison, Britain has chosen to become slow and complicated. The Conservative right is about to discover that, for multinational corporations located in Britain, there is one thing worse than being regulated by Brussels, and that is not being regulated by Brussels.
Secondly, there are those uber-elite individuals who still dwell in Blair’s fin de siècle bubble of a single open global society, including Blair himself. Blair has said that he cannot understand the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.8 Presumably he is even more flummoxed by the Brexit vote, and especially by how it sucked in quasi-Blairites such as Michael Gove. Blair’s myopia has many possible explanations. But one is that people like him do genuinely now inhabit a borderless global space, in which laws, regulations and policies are only ever things to be viewed from above, and never things one is forced into accepting.
Brexit may make London a less attractive destination for the global super-rich (the 0.001 per cent or so), a class that includes Blair. This would be no bad thing. However, it should also be recognised that this class is defined partly by its ability to buy its way out of jurisdictional limits when it needs to. ‘Citizenship services’ mean that passports can be bought; ‘tax efficiency services’ mean that the mega-wealthy can avoid ever having to pay for local social goods; ‘family offices’ exist to manage the international affairs (houses, education, leisure) of super-rich families. So long as these services exist, decisions about national sovereignty and international law have relatively little effect on the freedom of the extremely rich. The extremely wealthy are Brexit-proof.
The worry must be that, in a stagnant economy, politicians will be tempted to formally recognise the privileges that this class possesses. This means accepting that they won’t pay their tax in full, granting them the residency rights that they desire, relieving them of inconvenient obligations to be transparent (of the sort the EU might have imposed, in relation to money-laundering, say). All of this would be in the hope that these people continue to spend time in post-Brexit Britain and splash some of their cash around.
Finally there is the class that has become known as the ‘precariat’, which will surely expand in post-Brexit Britain. The vote against immigration was really a vote against a multicultural precariat: the eastern and southern Europeans who do relatively low-wage, low-security work in the UK. We still don’t know the future of these migrants or how far their numbers will reduce in future. Given that immigration tends to rise and fall in correlation to economic growth, perhaps Brexit will achieve reduced immigration after all. But if there is further austerity, as George Osborne declared inevitable in the event of Brexit, that will mean more people are forced into contingent forms of wage labour. This is where various elements of the right currently converge, around the idea of increased employment through reduced workplace rights. There are various aggressive neoliberal aspects of the current Tory policy agenda that haven’t gone anywhere.
There is one emerging economic model that ties all of these strands together, satisfying regressive nineteenth-century liberals, techno-utopian libertarians, communitarian conservatives, corporate elites and policy pragmatists equally. This is the cluster of platforms and services known as the ‘sharing economy’. These seek to push a rentier mentality into more and more corners of society, making the ownership of assets (homes, bedrooms, cars, capital equipment, free time, and so on) the condition of an income.
The opportunities for the precariat to be administered and employed via digital platforms have only just begun to be explored, but have huge potential. This fulfils a liberal dream of allowing labour to find its ‘correct’ price in an entirely flexible, maximally liquid market, just as financial markets do for shares and bonds according to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. I would expect this argument to gain new momentum over the coming years, advanced as much by those with a regressive fantasy of liberal Victoriana as by those with a techno-utopian fantasy of capitalist upheaval.
Outside of Nigel Farage’s local pub, where people dream that their warm beer breaks EU rules and take pride in refusing to wear seatbelts on their drive home, modern societies are never unregulated. The irony of liberalism after Brexit is that, in sticking up two fingers to the regulatory power of the unelected technocrats in Brussels, it probably hastens the regulatory advance of invisible and unspoken algorithms in Silicon Valley corporations. For Steve Hilton, happily resident in prosperous multicultural northern California, surrounded by a coterie of venture capitalists and the anti-democratic digerati, his long-distance support for Brexit makes perfect sense.
The Crisis of Statistical Fact
In theory, statistics should help settle arguments. They ought to provide stable reference points that everyone – no matter what their politics – can agree on. Yet in recent years, divergent levels of trust in statistics have opened up one of the key schisms in Western liberal democracies. Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, a study in the US discovered that 68 per cent of Trump supporters distrusted the economic data published by the Federal Government. In the UK, a research project by Cambridge University and YouGov looking at conspiracy theories discovered that 55 per cent of the population believes that the government ‘is hiding the truth about the number of immigrants living here’.9
Rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them. Antipathy to statistics has become one of the harbingers of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various ‘experts’ that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016. Not only are statistics viewed by many as untrustworthy, there appears to be something almost insulting or arrogant about them. Reducing social and economic issues to numerical aggregates and averages seems to violate some people’s sense of political decency.
Nowhere is this more vividly manifest than with immigration. The think-tank British Future has studied how best to win arguments in favour of immigration and multiculturalism. One of their main findings is that people often respond warmly to qualitative evidence, such as the stories of individual migrants and photographs of diverse communities. But statistics – especially regarding the alleged benefits of migration to Britain’s economy – elicit quite the opposite reaction. People assume that the numbers are manipulated and dislike the elitist nature of resorting to quantitative evidence. Presented with official estimates of how many immigrants are in the country illegally, a common response is to scoff. Far from increasing support for immigration, British Future found, pointing to its positive effect on GDP can actually make people more hostile to it. GDP itself has come to seem like a Trojan Horse for an elitist liberal agenda. Sensing this, politicians have largely abandoned discussing immigration in economic terms.
All of this presents a serious challenge for liberal democracy. Put bluntly, the British Government – its officials, experts, advisers and many of its politicians – does believe that immigration is on balance good for the economy. The British Government did believe that Brexit was the wrong choice. The problem is that the government is now engaged in self-censorship, for fear of provoking people further. This is an unwelcome dilemma. Either the state continues to make claims that it believes to be valid, but is accused by sceptics of propaganda. Or politicians and officials are confined to saying what feels plausible and intuitively true, but may ultimately be inaccurate. Either way, politics becomes mired in accusations of lies and cover-ups.
The declining authority of statistics – and of the experts who analyse them – is at the heart of the crisis that has become known as ‘post-truth’ politics. And in this uncertain new world, attitudes towards quantitative expertise have become increasingly polarised. From one perspective, grounding politics in statistics is elitist, undemocratic and oblivious to people’s emotional investments in their community and nation. It is just one more way in which privileged people in London, Washington DC or Brussels seek to impose their worldview on everybody else. From the opposite perspective, statistics are quite the opposite of elitist. They enable journalists, citizens and politicians to discuss society as a whole, not on the basis of anecdote, sentiment or prejudice, but in ways that can be validated. The alternative to quantitative expertise is less likely to be democracy than an unleashing of tabloid editors and demagogues providing their own ‘truth’ about what’s going on across society.
Is there a way out of this polarisation? Must we simply choose between a politics of facts and one of emotions, or is there another way of looking at the situation? One way is to relate statistics back to their history. We need to try to see them for what they are: neither unquestionable truths nor elite conspiracies, but tools designed to simplify the job of government, for better or worse. Viewed historically, we can see what a crucial role statistics have played in our understanding of nation states and their progress. This raises the alarming question of how – if at all – we will continue to have common ideas of society and collective progress should statistics fall by the wayside.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, in the aftermath of prolonged and bloody conflicts, European rulers adopted an entirely new perspective on the task of government, focused upon demographic trends – a perspective made possible by the birth of modern statistics. Since ancient times, censuses had been used to track population size, but these were costly and laborious to carry out, and focused on citizens who were considered politically important (property-owning men), rather than society as a whole. Statistics offered something quite different, transforming the nature of politics in the process.
One aspect of their novelty consisted in the aspiration to know a population in its entirety, rather than simply to pinpoint strategically valuable sources of power and wealth. In the early days, this didn’t always involve producing numbers. In Germany, for example (from where we get the term Statistik), the challenge was to map disparate customs, institutions and laws across an empire of hundreds of micro-states. What characterised this knowledge as statistical was its holistic nature: it aimed to produce a picture of the nation as a whole. Statistics would do for populations what cartography did for territory. Equally significant was the inspiration of the natural sciences. Thanks to standardised measures and mathematical techniques, statistical knowledge could be presented as objective, in much the same way as astronomy. Inspired by Francis Bacon, pioneering English demographers such as William Petty and John Graunt adapted mathematical techniques to estimate population changes, for which they were hired by Oliver Cromwell and Charles II.
The emergence in the late seventeenth century of government advisers claiming scientific authority, rather than political or military acumen, represents the origins of the ‘expert’ culture now so reviled by populists. These path-breaking individuals were neither pure scholars nor government officials, but hovered somewhere between the two. They were enthusiastic amateurs who offered a new perspective on populations that privileged aggregates and objective facts. Thanks to their mathematical prowess, they believed they could calculate what would otherwise require a vast census to discover.
There was initially only one client for this type of expertise, and the clue is in the word ‘statistics’. Only centralised nation states had the capacity to collect data across large populations in a standardised fashion, and only states had any need for such data in the first place. Over the second half of the eighteenth century, European states began to collect more statistics of the sort that would appear familiar to us today. Casting an eye over national populations, states became focused upon a range of quantities: births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, harvests, imports, exports, price fluctuations. Things that would previously have been registered locally and variously at parish level became aggregated at a national level.
New techniques were developed to represent these indicators, which exploited both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the page, laying out data in matrices and tables, just as merchants had done with the development of standardised book-keeping techniques in the late fifteenth century. Organising numbers into rows and columns offered a powerful new way of displaying the attributes of a given society. Large, complex issues could now be surveyed simply by scanning the data laid out geometrically across a single page.
These innovations carried extraordinary potential for governments. By simplifying diverse populations down to specific indicators, and displaying them in suitable tables, governments could circumvent the need to acquire detailed local and historical insight. Of course, viewed from a different perspective, this blindness to local cultural variability is precisely what makes statistics vulgar and potentially offensive. Regardless of whether a given nation had any common cultural identity, statisticians would assume some standard uniformity or, some might argue, impose one on it.
Not every aspect of a given population can be captured by statistics. There is always an implicit choice in what is included and what is excluded, and this choice can become a political issue in its own right. The fact that GDP only captures the value of paid work, thereby excluding the work traditionally done by women in the domestic sphere, has made it a target of feminist critique since the 1960s. In France, it has been illegal to collect census data on ethnicity since 1978, on the basis that such data could be used for racist political purposes. (This has the side-effect of making systemic racism in the labour market much harder to quantify.)
Despite these criticisms, the aspiration to depict a society in its entirety, and to do so in an objective fashion, has meant that various progressive ideals have been attached to statistics. The image of statistics as a cool, objective science of society is only one part of the story. The other part is about how powerful political ideals became invested in these techniques: ideals of ‘evidence-based policy’, rationality, progress and nationhood grounded in facts, rather than in romanticised memories.
Since the high-point of the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century, liberals and republicans have had great hopes that national measurement frameworks could produce a more rational politics, organised around demonstrable improvements in social and economic life. The great theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, famously described nations as ‘imagined communities’, but statistics offer to anchor this imagination in something tangible.10 Equally, they promise to reveal what historical path the nation is on – what kind of progress is occurring? How rapidly? For Enlightenment liberals, who saw nations as moving in a single historical direction, this question was crucial. The potential of statistics to reveal the state of the nation was seized in post-Revolutionary France. The Jacobin state set about imposing a whole new framework of national measurement and national data collection. The world’s first official bureau of statistics was opened in Paris in 1800. Uniformity of data collection, overseen by a centralised cadre of highly educated experts, was an integral part of the ideal of a centrally governed republic, which sought to establish a unified, egalitarian society.
From the Enlightenment onwards, statistics played an increasingly important role in the public sphere, informing debate in the media and providing social movements with evidence they could use. Over time, the production and analysis of such data became less dominated by the state. Academic social scientists began to analyse data for their own purposes, often entirely unconnected to government policy goals. By the late nineteenth century, reformers such as Charles Booth in London and W. E. B. Du Bois in Philadelphia were conducting their own surveys to understand urban poverty.
To recognise how statistics have been entangled in notions of national progress, consider the case of GDP. GDP is an estimate of the sum total of a nation’s consumer spending, government spending, investments and trade balance (exports minus imports), which is represented in a single number. This is fiendishly difficult to get right. In the 1930s, efforts to calculate this figure began, like so many mathematical techniques, as a matter of marginal, somewhat nerdish interest. It was only elevated to a matter of national political urgency by the Second World War, when wartime governments needed to know whether the national population was producing enough to keep up the war effort. In the decades that followed, this single indicator, though never without its critics, took on a hallowed political status, as the ultimate barometer of a government’s competence. Whether GDP is rising or falling is now virtually a proxy for whether society is moving forwards or backwards.
Or take the example of opinion polling, an early instance of statistical innovation occurring in the private sector. During the 1920s, statisticians developed methods for identifying a representative sample of survey respondents, so as to glean the attitudes of the public as a whole. This breakthrough, which was first seized upon by market researchers, soon led to the birth of the opinion polling. This new industry immediately became the object of public and political fascination, as the media reported on what it told us about what ‘women’ or ‘Americans’ or ‘manual labourers’ thought about the world.
Nowadays, the flaws of polling are endlessly picked apart. But this is partly due to the tremendous hopes that have been invested in polling since its origins in the 1930s. Only to the extent that we believe in mass democracy are we fascinated or concerned by what the public thinks. But for the most part it is thanks to statistics, and not to democratic institutions as such, that we can know what the public thinks about specific issues. We underestimate how much of our sense of ‘the public interest’ is rooted in expert calculation, as opposed to democratic institutions.
As indicators of health, prosperity, equality, opinion and quality of life have come to tell us who we are collectively and whether things are getting better or worse, politicians have leaned heavily on statistics to buttress their authority. Often, they lean too heavily, stretching evidence too far, interpreting data too loosely, in the service of their cause. But that’s an inevitable hazard of the prevalence of numbers in public life, and needn’t necessarily trigger the type of wholehearted rejections of expertise that we’ve witnessed recently.
In many ways, the contemporary populist attack on expertise is born out of the same resentment as the attack on elected representatives. In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have ‘lost touch’ with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular. Both statisticians and politicians have fallen into the trap of ‘seeing like a state’, to use a phrase from the anarchist political thinker James C. Scott. Speaking scientifically about the nation – for instance in terms of macroeconomics – is an insult to those who would prefer to rely on memory and narrative for their sense of nationhood, and are sick of being told that their ‘imagined community’ does not exist. On the other hand, statistics (together with elected representatives) performed an adequate job of supporting a credible public discourse for decades if not centuries. What changed?
Origins of the current crisis
The crisis of statistics is not quite as sudden as it might seem. For roughly 350 years, the great achievement of statisticians has been to reduce the complexity and fluidity of national populations into manageable, comprehensible facts and figures. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after, and it is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are being strained by more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways. Efforts to represent demographic, social and economic changes in terms of simple, well-recognised indicators are losing legitimacy.
Consider the changing political and economic geography of nation states over the past forty years. The statistics that dominate political debate are largely national in character: poverty levels, unemployment, GDP, net migration and so on. But the geography of capitalism has been pulling in somewhat different directions. Plainly globalisation has not rendered geography irrelevant. In many cases it has made the location of economic activity far more important, exacerbating the inequality between successful locations (such as London or San Francisco) and less successful locations (such as North East England or the American Rust Belt). But the key geographic units involved are no longer nation states. Rather, it is cities, regions or individual urban neighbourhoods that are rising and falling.
The Enlightenment ideal of the nation as a single community, bound together by a common measurement framework, is becoming harder and harder to sustain. If you’re living in a town in the Welsh Valleys that was once dependent on steel manufacturing or mining for jobs, politicians’ talk about how ‘the economy’ is ‘doing well’ is likely to breed additional resentment. From that perspective, the term ‘GDP’ simply doesn’t capture anything meaningful or credible.
When macroeconomics is used to make a political argument, this implies that the losses in one part of the country are more than offset by gains somewhere else. Headline-grabbing national indicators, such as GDP and inflation, conceal all sorts of localised gains and losses that are less commonly discussed by national politicians. Immigration may be good for the economy overall, but this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any local costs at all. So when politicians use national indicators to make their case, they implicitly assume some spirit of patriotic mutual sacrifice on the part of voters: you might be the loser on this occasion, but next time you might be the beneficiary. But what if the tables are never turned? What if the same city or region wins over and over again, while others always lose? On what principle of give-and-take is that justified?
In Europe, the currency union has exacerbated this problem. The indicators that matter to the European Central Bank (ECB), for example, are those representing half a billion people. The ECB is concerned with the inflation or unemployment rate across the eurozone as if it were a single homogeneous territory, at the same time as the economic fate of European citizens is splintering in different directions, depending on which region, city or neighbourhood they happen to live in. Official knowledge becomes ever more abstracted from lived experience, until that knowledge simply ceases to be relevant or credible any longer.
The privileging of the nation as the natural scale of analysis is one of the inbuilt biases of statistics that years of economic change have eaten away at. Another inbuilt bias that is coming under increasing strain is classification. Part of the job of statisticians is to classify people by putting them into a range of boxes that the statistician has created: employed or unemployed, married or unmarried, pro-Europe or anti-Europe. So long as people can be placed into categories in this way, it becomes possible to discern how far a given classification extends across the population. This can involve somewhat reductive choices. To count as unemployed, for example, a person has to report to a survey that they are involuntarily out of work, even if it may be more complicated than that in reality. Many people move in and out of work all the time, for reasons that might have as much to do with health and family needs as labour market conditions. But thanks to this simplification, it becomes possible to identify the rate of unemployment across the population as a whole.
But what if many of the defining questions of our age are answerable not in terms of the extent of people encompassed but in terms of the intensity with which people are affected? Unemployment is one example. The fact that Britain got through the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008–13 without unemployment substantially rising is generally viewed as a positive achievement. But the focus on ‘unemployment’ masked the rise of under-employment, that is, people not getting a sufficient amount of work or being employed at a level below that which they’re qualified for. This currently accounts for around 6 per cent of the ‘employed’ labour force. Then there is the rise of the self-employed workforce, where the divide between ‘employed’ and ‘involuntarily unemployed’ makes little sense.
This is not a criticism of Britain’s Office for National Statistics, which does now produce data on under-employment. But so long as politicians continue to deflect criticism by pointing to the unemployment rate, the experiences of those struggling to get enough work or to live off their wages go unrepresented in public debate. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if these same people became suspicious of policy experts and the use of statistics in political debate, given the mismatch between what politicians say about the labour market and the lived reality.
The rise of identity politics since the 1960s has put additional strain on such systems of classification. Statistical data is only credible if people will accept the limited range of demographic categories on offer, categories which are selected by the expert not the respondent. But where identity becomes a political issue, people demand to define themselves on their own terms, whether in relation to gender, sexuality, race or class. Opinion polling may be suffering for similar reasons. Polls have traditionally captured people’s attitudes and preferences on the reasonable assumption that people will behave accordingly. But in an age of declining political participation, it’s not enough simply to know which box someone would prefer to put an ‘X’ in. One also needs to know whether they feel strongly enough about doing so to bother. When it comes to capturing such fluctuations in emotional intensity, polling is a clumsy tool.
The discipline of statistics has regularly faced criticism throughout its long history. The challenges that identity politics and globalisation present to it are not all that new either. Why then do the events of the last year feel quite so damaging to the ideal of quantitative expertise and its role in political debate? One reason is that an alternative to statistics is emerging that threatens to render many traditional forms of expertise redundant.
In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation. Traditionally, statisticians have known which questions they wanted to ask regarding which population, then set out to answer them. By contrast, data is automatically produced whenever we swipe a loyalty card, comment on Facebook or search for something on Google. As our cities, cars, homes and household objects become digitally connected, the amount of data we leave in our trail will grow even greater. In this new world, data is captured first, research questions come later.
In the long term, the implications of this will likely be as profound as the invention of statistics was in the late seventeenth century. The rise of ‘big data’ provides far greater opportunities for quantitative analysis than any amount of polling or statistical modelling. But it is not just the quantity of data that is different. It represents an entirely different type of knowledge, accompanied by a new mode of expertise.
First, there is no fixed scale of analysis (such as the nation), nor are there any settled categories (such as ‘unemployed’). These vast new data sets can be mined in search of patterns, trends, correlations and emergent moods, which becomes a way of tracking the identities people bestow upon themselves (via hashtags and tags) rather than imposing classifications on them. This is a form of aggregation suitable to a more fluid political age, in which not everything can be reliably referred back to some Enlightenment ideal of the nation state as guardian of the public interest.
Second, the majority of us are entirely oblivious to what all this data is saying about us, either individually or collectively. There is no equivalent of an Office for National Statistics for commercially collected ‘big data’. We live in an age where our feelings, identities and affiliations can be tracked and analysed with unprecedented speed and sensitivity – but there is nothing that anchors this new capacity in the public interest or public debate. There are data analysts who work for Google and Facebook, but they are not ‘experts’ of the sort who generate statistics and who are now so widely condemned. Indeed, the anonymity and secrecy of the new analysts potentially makes them far more politically powerful than any social scientist.
A company like Facebook has the capacity to carry out quantitative social science research on hundreds of millions of people, at very low cost. But it has very little incentive to reveal the results. In 2014, when Facebook researchers published results of a study of ‘emotional contagion’ that they’d carried out on their users – in which they altered news feeds to see how it affected the content that users then shared in response – there was an outcry that people were being unwittingly experimented on. So, from Facebook’s point of view, why go to all the hassle of publishing? Why not just do the study and keep quiet?
What is most politically significant about this shift from a logic of statistics to one of data is how comfortably it sits with the rise of populism. Populist leaders can heap scorn upon traditional ‘experts’, such as economists and pollsters, while trusting in a different form of numerical analysis altogether. Such politicians rely on a new, less visible elite, who seek out patterns from vast data banks, but rarely make any public pronouncements, let alone publish any evidence. These data analysts are often physicists or mathematicians, whose skills are not developed for the study of society at all. But this is consistent with the worldview propagated by, for example, Dominic Cummings, who has argued that ‘physics, mathematics, and computer science are domains in which there are real experts, unlike macro-economic forecasting’.
Few social findings arising from data analytics ever end up in the public domain. This means that it does very little to help anchor political narrative in any shared reality. With the authority of statistics waning, and nothing stepping into the public sphere to replace it, people can live in whatever ‘imagined community’ they feel most aligned to and willing to believe in, which may or may not be a national one. Where statistics can be used to correct faulty claims about the economy, society or the population, data analytics does little to prevent people from giving way to their instinctive perspectives or emotional prejudices. On the contrary, companies such as Cambridge Analytica treat those feelings as things to be tracked.
But even if there were an ‘Office for Data Analytics’, acting on behalf of the public and the government as the ONS does, it’s not clear that it would offer the kind of scientific perspective that liberals today are struggling to defend. The new apparatus of number-crunching is well suited to detecting trends, sensing the mood and spotting things as they bubble up. It serves campaign managers and marketers very well. It is less well suited to making the kinds of unambiguous, objective, potentially consensus-forming claims about society that statisticians and economists are paid for.
In this new technical and political climate, it will fall to the new digital elite to identify the facts, projections and truth amid the rushing stream of data that results. Whether indicators like ‘GDP’ and ‘unemployment’ continue to carry political clout remains to be seen, but if they don’t, it won’t necessarily herald the end of experts, still less the end of truth. The question to be taken more seriously, now that numbers are being constantly generated behind our backs and beyond our knowledge, is where the crisis of statistics leaves representative democracy.
On the one hand, it is worth recognising the capacity of long-standing political institutions to fight back. Just as ‘sharing economy’ platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have recently been thwarted by legal rulings (Uber being compelled to recognise drivers as employees, Airbnb being banned altogether by some municipal authorities), privacy and human rights law represents a potential obstacle to the extension of data analytics. What is less clear is how the benefits of digital analytics might ever be offered to the public, in the way that many statistical data sets are. Bodies such as the Open Data Institute, founded by Tim Berners-Lee among others, campaign to make data publicly available, but have little leverage over the corporations where so much of our data now accumulates. Statistics began life as a tool through which the state could view society, but gradually developed into something that academics, civic reformers and businesses had a stake in. But for many data analytics firms, secrecy surrounding methods and sources of data is a competitive advantage that they won’t give up voluntarily.
A ‘post-statistical’ society is a potentially frightening proposition, not because it would lack any forms of truth or expertise altogether, but because it would drastically privatise them. Statistics are one of many pillars of liberalism, indeed of Enlightenment. The experts who produce and use them have become painted as arrogant and oblivious to the emotional and local dimensions of politics. No doubt there are ways in which data collection could be adapted to reflect lived experiences better. But the battle that will need to be waged in the long term is not between an elite-led politics of facts versus a populist politics of feeling. It is between those still committed to public knowledge and public argument, and those who profit from the ongoing disintegration of those things.
Theresa May’s ‘Protective State’
Over the course of 2014–15, I took part in a research project prompted by the government-sponsored campaign of 2013, when Theresa May was home secretary, in which vans carried billboards bearing the words ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’11 In order to understand how such a thing as that billboard could have come about, we felt we needed some insight into the mindset of the Home Office and its officials. One of the things we did was to talk, off the record, with various civil servants past and present.
In those conversations, a powerful image emerged of a department that had been embattled for a long time. In an era in which national borders were viewed as an unwelcome check on the freedom of capital and (to a lesser extent) labour, and geographic mobility was regarded as a crucial factor in promoting productivity and GDP growth, the Home Office, with its obsession with ‘citizenship’ and security, was an irritant to the Treasury and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. There has been an ideological conflict in Whitehall for some time regarding the proper relationship between the state, markets and citizens, but it has been masked by the authority of a succession of prominent, ambitious chancellors pushing primarily economic visions of Britain’s place in the world. One can imagine the resentment that must have brewed among home secretaries and Home Office officials continually represented as the thorn in the side of Britain’s ‘economic competitiveness’.
The Home Office occupies a particular position vis-à-vis the public, which sometimes translates into class politics. Home secretaries are often moved by the plight of the defenceless in society: vulnerable children, elderly people plagued by rowdy teenagers on their estates, the victims of Harold Shipman (whose suicide apparently tempted David Blunkett to ‘open a bottle’). Often, these people are defenceless because they are powerless, and they are powerless because they are poor, less well educated and culturally marginalised. And yet they are still British, and deserving of the state’s defence. One former Home Office official told me that the Home Office has long been identified as the voice of the working class inside Whitehall, and feels looked down on by the Oxbridge elite in Downing Street and the Treasury. This person compared the ethos of the Home Office to that of Millwall fans: ‘No one likes us, we don’t care.’
Home secretaries see the world in Hobbesian terms, as a dangerous and frightening place, in which vulnerable people are robbed, murdered and blown up, and these things happen because the state has failed them. What’s worse, lawyers and Guardian readers – who are rarely the victims of these crimes – then criticise the state for trying harder to protect the public through surveillance and policing.
I suspect that many home secretaries have developed some of these ways of thinking, including – or maybe especially – Labour home secretaries. Blunkett and John Reid certainly did. But Theresa May’s long tenure (six years) and apparent comfort at the Home Office suggests that the mindset may have deepened in her case or meshed better with her pre-existing worldview. This includes a powerful resentment towards the Treasury, George Osborne in particular (whom she allegedly sacked with the words ‘Go away and learn some emotional intelligence’), and the ‘Balliol men’ who have traditionally worked there. In making sense of May’s extraordinary leader’s speech at the 2016 Conservative Party Conference, the first thing to do is to put it back in the context of her political experience. For her, the first duty of the state is to protect, as Hobbes argued in 1651, and this comes before questions of ‘left’ and ‘right’.
The ‘protective state’ May outlined was a state that looks after people. This is very different from the neoliberal state, whose job was characterised by Peter Mandelson, Bill Clinton and other Third Wayers in the 1990s as ‘steering not rowing’. The target political audience of the neoliberal politician was always the ‘hard-working family’. This imaginary unit had ‘aspiration’ and wanted to ‘get ahead’. The state’s job was to keep interest rates low on the assumption that people wanted to own assets, and otherwise to maintain a ‘level playing field’ so they could reap the rewards of all that hard work. Clearly most people cannot be conceived of as entrepreneurs in a neoliberal society – though the ‘sharing economy’ is now belatedly pressing that Thatcherite dream more deeply into the fabric of society – but they are assumed to be exerting themselves in order to become something better: richer, happier, healthier and so on. They are optimisers, just as economists assume in their models.
May has replaced ‘hard-working families’ with ‘ordinary people’, which includes the ‘working class’. She says she wants the Tories to be the party of ‘working people’, though it no longer sounds as if these people are looking for much improvement or change in their lives. Faced with the unknown, they are more likely to retreat than found a start-up. They need looking after. This means that the necessities of life – health, energy, housing – must remain affordable, and threats must be kept at bay. The role of the state is not to initiate or facilitate change, but to prevent it, on the assumption that in general it is likely to be undesirable. Of course, in an age of political and economic crises, the ‘protective state’ must develop a very clear idea of who is to be looked after and who is to be rebuffed.
The state that looks after people (its own people) is not quite the same as the state that cares for people, of the sort that was developed in Britain after the Second World War. If May wanted to push care to the centre of her vision, a new politics of welfare would be required, one which used fiscal policy to respond to basic material and social needs, where ‘needs’ are understood as things we all have by virtue of our humanity, not our identity. A care-oriented state would have to pursue a far-reaching cultural reversal of the Osbornite condemnation of welfare recipients. There were some signs, during the early months of May’s premiership, that the more punitive end of recent welfare policies would be abandoned. It will be interesting to see how much more of that there is to come. But for the time being, it sounds as if the May government is going to listen to the fears and demands of its particular people, rather than seek to map and meet the needs of people in general.
Economic liberals are already nervous that the new prime minister is a protectionist. Outside her Home Office brief, there are signs that her thinking – and that of her policy adviser, Nick Timothy – departs from the neoliberal consensus in key ways. Abandoning Osborne’s austerity targets and declaring war on tax evaders are signs that the financial sector and the very wealthy can no longer view the Conservative Party as their tool. Timothy’s vision of ‘Erdington conservatism’ (named after the working-class area of Birmingham where he grew up) imagines the state intervening in the economy to defend the interests of the immobile against the mobile – protecting ‘ordinary’ parents, patients and workers, who are too often left dependent on slack services and callous bosses, and cannot simply up sticks and go elsewhere. In that way of seeing things, this is something liberals and the wealthy will never understand because they’ve probably never experienced hardship. Resonances with Blue Labour and Red Toryism – communitarian policy movements that emerged after 2008 with the aim of challenging economic and social liberalism at the same time – have been widely noted.
There is no contradiction between social conservatism and economic protectionism: both are hostile to the fluidity, cosmopolitanism and perceived snobbery of liberalism. May’s conference declaration, ‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’, was pitched as much at bankers as it was at left-wing intellectuals. Whether it was also a ‘dog-whistle’ regarding refugees probably depends on what breed of dog you are. I was surprised that a speech condemning financial elites, human rights lawyers and nationless people in blanket terms wasn’t interpreted as antisemitic. But as Stuart Hall recognised, rampant capitalism has a far greater capacity to undermine traditional community relations than social liberalism: the Thatcherite effort to weld social conservatism to economic liberalism was far more contradictory than the present turn to economic interventionism. This latest reconfiguration of conservatism could ultimately be more sustainable even than Thatcher’s.
We currently have no idea what May’s actual intentions are in this respect, just as we have no very clear idea of how actively she would like to police the boundaries of ‘British citizenship’. In all likelihood, the two agendas – the economic and the nationalist – will emerge in tandem: there was a hint of this in the new home secretary Amber Rudd’s suggestion that companies be forced to list their foreign workers. Prejudice in society carries far more potential when it is also pursued in the economy. The reason German neoliberals (or ‘ordoliberals’) of the 1930s and 1940s were so hostile to cartels and monopolies wasn’t that they saw them as necessarily inefficient, but that non-market economies can be more easily requisitioned in the service of political goals: they were a vital precondition of the Nazi political economy. By contrast, competitive markets perform a liberal function, because they block the social and political ambitions of interventionist leaders. I am not suggesting any direct analogy here, but if neoliberalism is indeed now giving way to a new political-economic formation, we should be alert to the various new social and cultural opportunities this offers the state, and not only those that pertain to the economy. Protectionism (of indigenous industries and workers) is never simply an economic policy, but involves clear statements of who is in and who is out.
The European Union was founded partly on ordoliberal principles, which require the state to provide a rigid legal constitution in defence of open and competitive markets; hence the inclusion of anti-trust and anti-state aid provisions in the Treaty of Rome. Member states are simply not allowed to ‘pick winners’ and defend ‘national champions’ or look after those who have greater claims to indigenous economic rights (though the application of these rules has been variable, and states have always wanted to do favours for their nation’s leading car manufacturers). This European post-nationalism is what Brexit was pitted against. May and Timothy have far greater legal and political opportunity to pursue a protectionist agenda now that Britain is on its way out of that ordoliberal framework. If May was a secret Brexiteer, that might be why. The question is the extent to which Britain’s withdrawal will cause any of the ordoliberals’ grave fears to be realised, in Britain or on the Continent, should the basic competitive framework of the EU start to be dismantled.
Britain is now a more unequal society than it has ever been since the Second World War. Class is a powerful determinant of the lives people lead. It doesn’t, however, perform quite the same role in sustaining the cultural and political status quo that it did before neoliberalism, and certainly not the same role it did before the 1960s, which helps to explain why May’s ‘protective state’ has become possible and necessary. One thing that Brexit demonstrated, which May is clearly keen to exploit, is that cultural divisions no longer map tidily onto economic ones. Working-class lives are buffeted by change, including the changes represented by immigration, but New Labour only ever invited people to embrace more change. The traditional middle classes and aristocracy have not been in the driving seat of British politics for more than thirty years, as the financial elite exploited the exuberance of fin de siècle Britain, London especially. It’s been said that Thatcher wanted a society of people like her father, but produced a society of people like her son.
Clearly May wants to change that. But the new cultural coalition that she aims to represent – of working-class Brexiteers, pensioners, Daily Mail readers and traditionalists – scarcely holds together as an identifiable group. Nor are the boundaries around these identities very clear cut. They may well aggregate into a fearful electoral resource, but it is quite another thing for the state actively to intervene to look after these people, when historically it was the job of cultural institutions, ties, networks and communities to preserve their way of life. May’s cultural instincts are consistent with Burkean conservative philosophy, but that tradition is historically uncomfortable with state intervention of the sort she espoused in her party conference speech. To wed a Burkean ideal of community to a Hobbesian ideal of the protective state is problematic and potentially dangerous. The difficulty for Burkean conservatives today is that neoliberalism destroyed the resources on which ‘little platoons’ depend and thrive, so that tacitly understood conventions and rituals must now be reintroduced by the very thing that conservatives traditionally wanted to avoid depending on – namely, the modern state. The gaping hole in the Blue Labour and Red Tory agendas was always the question of statecraft: what exactly will the state do to promote the ideal of ‘faith, flag and family’?
It seems likely that the state will start performing acts of conservative discrimination which historically have been performed by way of cultural capital and softer forms of power. An example of how deranged the consequences can be is Nick Timothy’s suggestion that work visas be granted only to foreign students at Oxbridge and Russell Group universities. Policymakers may form their ideas on the basis of what goes down well in the pubs of Dorset, the comment pages of the Daily Mail or the working men’s clubs of Scarborough, but snobbery and chippiness are more troubling when they are converted into the printed word of the statute book.
It sounds as if the ‘protective state’ is ready to discriminate, and won’t be ashamed to admit it. It will discriminate regarding good and bad economic activity; it will discriminate between good and bad migrants; it will discriminate between good and bad ways of life. May is not afraid of sorting the wheat from the chaff. This may be the reason grammar schools symbolise something important for her, regardless of the evidence against their efficacy. In that respect, there is some continuity with neoliberalism, which sought to divide ‘winners’ from ‘losers’ in a range of different tests and competitive arenas. The key difference is that neoliberalism uses rivalry itself to identify the worthy. The neoliberal state offers no view on what a good company or school or artist looks like. Instead, it uses rankings, contests and markets in order to find out who rises to the top. The question any neoliberal – or liberal for that matter – might now want to ask May is this: on what basis do you distinguish the worthy from the unworthy? Are we now simply to be driven by the contingency of biography, where Timothy is fuelled by the anger he felt as a lower-middle-class boy in Erdington in the early 1990s, or May is guided by the example of her Anglican clergyman father? Is the fact that liberals haven’t experienced being the victim of regular petty crime or a failing school now going to be the principal basis for ignoring them?
Politicians have always used cultural tropes in order to build popularity and even hegemony. Thatcher spoke a nationalist, militarist language, while doing considerable harm to many of Britain’s institutions and traditions. Blair had his football, coffee mug and badly fitting jeans. Conservatives have often struggled to find a coherent post-Blair cultural scheme, alternating between fake displays of liberalism (Cameron’s huskies) and the embarrassing reality of their party base. Right now, however, matters of nationality and cultural tradition do not seem like window-dressing: when the state is offering to look after some of us, but not all of us, the way you look, talk, behave and learn threatens to become the most important political issue of all.
‘Strong and Stable’
Britain today confronts a variety of deep, even existential, uncertainties. The terms of its exit from the European Union, the country’s long-term economic prospects and Scotland’s future within the United Kingdom are all in the balance. In contrast to these unknowns, the outcome of the forthcoming general election already feels concrete: the Conservatives, consistently between 17 per cent and 20 per cent ahead in the polls, are on course for a landslide victory. In calling this election (despite promises not to) and in her campaigning for it, Prime Minister Theresa May is exploiting this contrast. The Conservatives are being presented as a new type of ‘people’s party’, under which everyone can huddle to stay safe from the multiple storms that are brewing. Mrs May and her party are treating this election as too important to be reduced to political divides. With no explanation of how, she claims that ‘every single vote for me and Conservative candidates will be a vote that strengthens my hand in the negotiations for Brexit’.
This is where May’s strategy and rhetoric become disconcerting. Ever since she took over from David Cameron last summer, she has spoken as if Britain is a nation harmoniously united, aside from the divisive forces of party politics and liberal elites seeking to thwart the ‘will of the people’. The first part of this is simply untrue: 48 per cent of the public voted to remain in the European Union, while the other 52 per cent held various ideas of what leaving could or should mean in practice.
May’s idea that her opponents are merely playing self-interested political ‘games’ is a classic populist trope, one that suggests that constitutional democracy is really an obstacle standing between people and leader. The prime minister’s rhetoric since calling the general election has implied that the best outcome for ‘the national interest’ would be to eradicate opposition altogether, whether that be in the news media, Parliament or the judiciary. For various reasons (not least the rise of the Scottish National Party), it is virtually impossible to imagine the Labour Party achieving a parliamentary majority ever again, as May well knows. To put all this another way, the main purpose of this election is to destroy two-party politics as Britain has known it since 1945.
One way in which May has aggressively pursued this outcome is in her unusual framing of the choice before the British electorate. We are used to politicians presenting policy proposals and promises to the public. Of course, in practice this involves spin doctors seeking to cast their party’s policies in the best light, news outlets twisting the message depending on their political biases, and many voters turning away in disgust because they don’t believe a word politicians say. That’s the routine. The Labour Party, despite occasional populist swipes at the news media, has been sticking roughly to this script. There is a certain irony in this, seeing as Labour, under the socialist leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, has become viewed by many pundits and voters as an implausible party of government. But Labour has nevertheless been regularly putting out clear and reasonably worked-out policy proposals since the election was announced on 18 April.
By contrast, May has made scarcely any statements regarding policy. Her speeches and campaign literature are peppered with the slogan ‘strong and stable leadership’, a phrase she then recites on the few occasions that she takes questions from journalists or members of the public. The very basis on which she is asking to be trusted and to be elected seems different from an ordinary policy platform. From a leader of a party still in thrall to Margaret Thatcher, May’s virtual silence on the economy is astonishing. The decision to vote Conservative is not to be based on knowledge of what a Conservative government will do – nobody has much of a clue about anything right now – but because of the desperate need for ‘strong and stable leadership’.
Symbolically and rhetorically, May’s campaign message is simple and potentially overpowering. While opposition parties dirty their hands with policy ideas and news conferences, she is seeking to personify the nation state itself – a job that technically belongs to the Queen. In one of her campaign videos, which sees her speaking solemnly in front of a Union Jack in a dimly lit room as if announcing a new war, she uses the term ‘us’ in multiple ways: at times it means the Conservative Party, at others it means the government, and at other times it means Britain itself. The mesmerising effect on the viewer is to lose track of the differences among the three. Representative democracy is being denigrated as petty and harmful to the national interest by a woman who has just called an unnecessary and unwanted election.
Where does this leave the opposition? The fear is that outside of Scotland, rival political parties will be reduced to the status of glorified think-tanks or non-governmental organisations. If they come up with good ideas, May’s government can happily adopt them. Already, the Conservatives have picked up one popular Labour Party policy for controlling the retail price of energy. With the Conservatives branded as more than just a political party, it is hard to see how their electoral stranglehold over England and Wales will be broken.
Politicians and parties can scarcely be blamed for wanting more power. That’s what drives them. What is worrying about May is that she seems to be deliberately aggravating Britain’s existential anxiety, precisely so as to benefit from it personally. Her extraordinary Trumpian accusation that European Union leaders are seeking to interfere in the election (since repeated by other Conservative ministers) seems to be aimed at stoking nationalist resentment towards the very people who will end up deciding what type of trade deals and ‘divorce bill’ Britain will be granted.12 This suggests that she views the destruction of the Labour Party as a more important national priority than Britain’s long-term economic prosperity.
Even if May is democratically successful in channelling the fears and resentments of what she calls ‘ordinary working people’, she will still face fearsome political obstacles. If it turns out that she is a weak negotiator with the European Union, and if she fails to grasp the magnitude of Britain’s economic vulnerability, the politics of resentment will be all she has to fall back on. Britain’s conservative tabloid press will praise every step in this direction with its usual wartime nostalgia, and she will continue to claim the support of ‘the people’. But the reality will be a fractured nation slipping ungraciously to the status of an angry and irrelevant mid-size economy.
Brexit will be fiendishly difficult, but there is no reason it has to be draped in so much nationalistic gravitas and secrecy, nor does it have to mean the hugely risky departure from the European single market. But that’s the path that Mrs May has chosen. Her gambit is to present herself and the Conservative Party as the one certainty in an otherwise chaotic political situation, with party politics a symptom of weakness and chaos. This is likely to work to devastating effect, but only because she refuses to acknowledge the crucial contribution that she and her party made to this chaos in the first place.