Theresa May’s fateful decision to call an early general election, resulting in the shock of a hung Parliament and the high watermark for Corbynism, exposed aspects of conservative and Brexit ideology that otherwise might have been concealed. The election campaign, followed quickly by Grenfell, and then the Windrush scandal of the following year, trashed May’s communitarian image. The sudden weakening of her leadership meant that she was no longer able to contain or control the forces of nationalism that were becoming increasingly vocal within her own party and its sympathetic newspapers. These forces would spend the rest of her premiership pushing for an ever harder, more punitive type of Brexit, no matter how much economic or political harm it did in the process. Crucially, May failed to exude the necessary mood of the hard Brexiteer, choosing instead to focus on detail, process and policy, where the demand was for something irresponsible and brash. With the foundation of Farage’s Brexit Party in late 2018, and the looming recognition that May would have to extend Britain’s membership of the EU beyond March 2019, the limits of her strategy were made abundantly clear.
The Corbyn Shock
When the internet first became part of everyday life in the late 1990s, it was celebrated as a wondrous new publishing machine, an amalgam of printing press and broadcaster that would radically democratise the means of communication at virtually zero cost. As any blogger or YouTube star can confirm, this dream didn’t die altogether, but neither did it capture what would turn out to be a more distinctive characteristic of the emerging technology. Twenty years on, it has become clear that the internet is less significant as a means of publishing than as a means of archiving. More and more of our behaviour is being captured and stored, from the trace we leave in online searches, the photos we share and ‘like’ on social media platforms to the vast archive of emails and tweets to which we contribute day after day. This massive quantity of information sits there, ready to be interpreted, if only something coherent can be extracted from the fog. It makes possible a new, panoramic way of assessing people, now that evidence of their character can be retrieved from the past – a fact that hasn’t escaped consumer credit rating firms or government border agencies.
YouTube, Spotify, Google Books and so on put decades’ worth, sometimes centuries’ worth, of ‘content’ at our fingertips. One effect of this is the compression of historical time. ‘Is it really fifty years since Sergeant Pepper?’ you may ask. But the time lapse feels immaterial. The internet turns up a perpetual series of anniversaries, disparate moments from disparate epochs, and presents them all as equivalent and accessible in the here and now. ‘In 1981,’ Mark Fisher wrote in Ghosts of My Life, ‘the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today.’1 Facebook extends this logic to people’s own personal history, informing them of what banal activity they were engaged in this time last year, or eight years ago. The archive isn’t merely available to us; it actively pursues us.
These phenomena have extended well beyond the limits of any particular digital platform, producing a more diffuse cultural logic. This is manifest in the novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, where the ‘big data’ mentality of capturing every biographical detail over time is elevated to an artform. This cultural epoch introduces a distinct set of problems. Which event from the past will pop up next? How can a clear narrative be extracted from the deluge of messages and numbers? What does my data trail say about me? Can past judgements of oneself or others be revised or revoked? It can seem as if there are only two options: to immerse oneself entirely, or to not give a damn. The figures who succeed in today’s populist politics are the ones who don’t give a damn. Politicians in the past may have sought ‘authenticity’, but that use of the term was always oxymoronic. If you’re trying too hard, you’re not authentic. When politics was still oriented around analogue television and newspapers, there were specific audiences for politicians’ performances and well-defined opportunities for them to exercise their charm: the TV debate, the interview, the press conference, their relationships with newspaper editors. But now that politicians (like the rest of us) are subject to ceaseless, wide-ranging monitoring, and leave a mountainous archive of evidence behind them, focal points of the traditional sort don’t matter so much. It will all come out anyway.
It is also telling that these successful populists are significantly older than your average 1990s ‘Third Way’ politician. Where the latter was a man in his early forties (now re-enacted by Emmanuel Macron), in recent years we have witnessed the unforeseen rise of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump, the oldest man ever to become president. These men have lurked on the margins of public life for decades, and a stockpile of images and stories has accumulated around them. Both Corbyn and Sanders have an impressive archive, appearing in photographs as young men being manhandled by police as they protested against racial segregation. It isn’t just their words that persuade people they offer a break from the status quo, their biographies do too. They have accrued the political equivalent of rich credit histories.
One event that did a great deal to push the ‘big data’ sensibility into UK politics, yet had little to do with the internet (it was triggered by a newspaper freedom of information request), was the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009. Its significance for our subsequent democratic upheavals hasn’t been fully appreciated. The capacity to peer into our representatives’ lives, find out what curtains they bought, whether they take taxis or the tube, where they go for lunch, circumvented the staged performances on which politicians prefer to be judged. It revealed differences of character and taste, the sort of thing we’re now used to glimpsing via Facebook or Instagram.
Thanks to the tabloids, we have long been accustomed to the interruption of politics by scandal, including stories designed to cause the greatest possible personal embarrassment. But here was something different. In place of the revelation of David Mellor’s bedroom attire came a drip-drip of inane yet telling details of purchases from John Lewis, which didn’t interrupt politics as usual so much as reconfigure it altogether. That Ed Miliband was revealed as the most frugal member of the cabinet, and his brother one of the most extravagant, spoke of something more important than their views on fiscal policy, and whatever that was seeped into the Labour leadership contest the following year.
One of the striking results of this new media ecology is that traditional smears no longer seem to work as effectively as they once did. Both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Theresa May in 2017 sought to do down their opponents by drawing attention to their past behaviour. A tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’ was leaked, presumably on the assumption that it would finish off his campaign once and for all. Corbyn was hammered over and over again for his past sympathies with the IRA, with the effect that Labour’s manifesto (and its vulnerabilities on Brexit) went relatively untouched.
The strategy failed because in this new environment, there is something worse than to err, and that is to be two-faced. Trump’s behaviour was shocking but scarcely out of character. Aggression and an overturning of ‘political correctness’ were what fuelled his campaign in the first place. As for Corbyn, his entire political career has been spent challenging Western imperialism and military rule. These smears didn’t tell the public much that they hadn’t already sensed – and could find out by Googling – about the candidates’ characters and priorities. By contrast, ‘liberal elites’ are vulnerable to the charge that their public and private lives don’t match up: they preach public service and altruism, while having two kitchens (Ed Miliband), making $675,000 from speeches to Goldman Sachs (Clinton) or not knowing exactly how many properties they own (David Cameron).
Hannah Arendt remarked in On Violence that rage is less commonly provoked by injustice than by hypocrisy. The difficulty is that politics must involve some degree of hypocrisy, if public and private life aren’t to dissolve into each other. ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’ is a useful ethical heuristic, but it doesn’t help judges, civil servants or ministers in taking decisions on behalf of the public. It won’t help Corbyn either if he becomes prime minister, despite his protestations that he would continue to maintain his allotment from Downing Street. Yet in many ways digital media serve to dissolve the division between public and private, allowing a relentless, unforgiving gaze to be cast on every discrepancy between words and actions, words past and words present. In the gladiatorial world of Twitter, the greatest mistake one can make isn’t to be offensive (that can be a virtue) but to contradict an earlier tweet, sometimes even from years ago, which can then be gleefully dug up again by trolls. Under these conditions, public credibility depends on boundless sincerity and obsessive consistency, as well as a disregard for the way one is seen by others. Trump’s archive does him few favours here: his back catalogue of tweets provides a constant source of entertainment in exposing the hypocrisy of his behaviour as president, though primarily for those who never believed him in the first place. This flies in the face of Machiavellian tenets concerning political prowess, which helps explain why non-politicians, marginal politicians and non-parties are now reaping the electoral benefits.
Given the degree to which conventional notions of leadership had become shaped to suit television and newspapers, the challenge to these notions is long overdue. Silly staged performances of normality must be finished for the time being. What was heartening about the 2017 general election was that it suggested a new symbolic status for policy of the sort that technocratic politics was unable to manufacture. Amid all the noise, slogans and smears of the campaign, it seems that Labour’s simple, eye-catching policies (free university tuition, more bank holidays, free school meals for all, more NHS funding, no tax rises for 95 per cent of earners) had the ability to cut through. These policies were crafted to produce a left-populist platform, with the idea in mind that policies can influence voters, but only if they are sufficiently straightforward to be able to hold their shape as they travel around an increasingly complex, chaotic public sphere. New Labour had two sets of experts: one to run its technocratic policymaking machine, the other to handle the media, which it believed could be tamed. But once editorial bottlenecks no longer determine the flow of news, and neurotic control of image is no longer realistic, policies must be designed to spread of their own accord, like internet memes. Trump’s ‘Build a wall!’ did this. Less propitiously for the Tories, once the phrase ‘dementia tax’ had attached itself to their campaign, it couldn’t be dislodged.
This isn’t to say that Corbyn himself wasn’t instrumental. Given the surge in youth turn-out, ‘free university tuition’ may have been decisive in ruining May’s hopes of a majority, especially given Corbyn’s promise to explore ways of alleviating existing debt burdens. But not just any leader could credibly have made this promise: Nick Clegg famously reneged on it in 2010, and no Clegg-alike could have got away with making it in 2017. Centrist Labour figures and their friends in the press continue to believe it is a bad policy, on the grounds that it uses general taxation to subsidise middle-class privileges. Corbyn is different, not because he has a different view of the economics, but because he has a different political biography. What’s more, he has become a valuable asset in the ‘attention economy’ of the digital landscape, as eyes are drawn inexorably towards personal and emotional quirks. As with Trump during his election campaign, Corbyn converted weaknesses into strength. The combination of his avuncular demeanour and the earnest policy-heavy document of the Labour manifesto proved an unexpected hit.
Blairites complain that Corbyn offers simple solutions to complex problems. But one of Corbyn’s solutions is difficult to argue with – namely, the resurrection of fiscal policy as a central tool of social and economic transformation, following twenty-five years in which both parties were paranoid about being tagged as ‘tax and spend’ fanatics. For the last ten years central bankers have pleaded with politicians to use fiscal policy more liberally in order to relieve the macroeconomic burden on monetary policy, but their call has fallen on deaf ears, especially in Europe. Coming in the wake of quantitative easing, one of the most technically obscure economic policies ever devised, the return of fiscal policy is welcome, both economically and politically. Corbyn has forced the Conservatives’ hand on this, turning austerity into a toxic political issue.
During the 1980s and 1990s, theorists such as Fredric Jameson argued that capitalism had brought about a fundamental change in the way cultural and political history are experienced. The distinctively modern sense of chronology, which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, viewed the past as unfolding progressively into the present, and the future as a space of new political and cultural possibilities to be seized by whichever artist, planner or political movement was bold enough. Postmodernity, by contrast, involved a collapse of historical progress into a perpetual present, a constant rehashing and recombining of existing styles and ideas, which put an end to any hope (or fear) that the future might be radically different.
The economic corollary of this was the entrenching of a neoliberal order in which liberal capitalism was treated as the final stage of human history: the only plausible plans were business plans, the only source of innovation was entrepreneurship. This vision still held on to some notion of progress, but it was now tightly bound to improvements in economic efficiency and consumer experiences. When Tony Blair used the word ‘modernisation’, he meant driving competition into public services. The idea of the ‘modern’ was shorn of its utopian or politically disruptive implications, provoking the suggestion that the future no longer existed, at least not as something different from the present.
The years of austerity since the global financial crisis have followed the postmodern script, but with one crucial difference. Postmodernity is typically conceived as repetitive, but playfully so. By contrast, austerity has come to be experienced as an endless, pointless repetition of pain (Yanis Varoufakis described Greece’s bailout conditions as ‘fiscal waterboarding’). With each announcement that austerity will have to be extended because spending cuts have failed once more to reduce the government deficit (just as most economists warned all along they would), the sense of disbelief has grown. In the worst cases, such as Greece, deficit-reduction schemes extend decades into the future. Precarity and rising housing costs trap young people in a state of perpetual pre-adulthood, unable to separate themselves from their parents. The need to escape this loop is ever more pressing, yet all that governments have been promising is more and more of it.
In these circumstances, hope is found in a form of historical revisionism. The successes of Corbyn and Sanders (and, in a different way, Trump) allow us to feel that it might be possible to restore and re-evaluate elements of a past which predates neoliberalism. Where the modernist’s view of history would treat the march of Reagan, Thatcher, Blair and Clinton as a necessary stage en route to something better, the current sense seems to be that theirs was a path taken in error. Instead, we must go back to go forward. In the case of Trump, the perceived error goes back much further, to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and before. What is notable about Trump’s brand of conservatism is that it shows little devotion to Reagan or recent conservative history, seeking instead to imagine away much of postwar US history in favour of a hologram of a nation where men manufacture the world’s goods and women iron their shirts.
A large part of the reason Corbyn causes Blairites so much distress – whether or not they dislike his policies or style of leadership – is that he threatens to destroy their narrative about the 1980s and 1990s. In that version of history, the hard left was heroically defeated by Neil Kinnock, setting the stage for the most successful Labour Government ever. What if Corbyn were to win a general election? How would that recast the significance of those battles? The coincidence of the Corbyn surge with the horror of Grenfell Tower has created the conditions – and the demand – for a kind of truth and reconciliation commission on forty years of neoliberalism. It is too simple to cast Corbyn as a throwback, but it is undeniable that his appeal and his authority derive partly from his willingness to cast a different, less forgiving light on recent history, so that we don’t have to carry on repeating it.
Reacting to the breakdown of the vote on 8 June, business leaders and conservative commentators have expressed their disquiet at the fact that young people are so enthusiastic about an apparently retrograde left-wing programme. ‘Memo to anyone under 45’, Digby Jones, the former director general of the CBI, tweeted: ‘You can’t remember last time socialists got control of the cookie jar: everything nationalised & nothing worked.’ To which the rebuke might be made: and you don’t remember how good things were compared to today. Speak to my undergraduate students about the 1970s and early 1980s, and you’ll see the wistful look on their faces as they imagine a society in which artists, writers and recent graduates could live independently in Central London, unharassed by student loan companies, workfare contractors or debt collectors. This may be a partial historical view, but it responds to what younger generations are currently cheated of: the opportunity to grow into adulthood without having their entire future mapped out as a financial strategy. A leader who can build a bridge to that past offers the hope of a different future.
The Riddle of Tory Brexitism
When historians examine Britain’s departure from the European Union, one of the things that will puzzle them is the behaviour of the Conservative Party. Thanks to copious demographic and geographical analysis, we are already in a position to make sense of the 2016 referendum result itself. But it remains difficult to grasp how the Tories could effectively have taken what was to everyone else a fringe issue and used it to attack the interests they had until very recently represented: the City of London, big business, the Union, even Whitehall.
To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, how did we end up in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – setting about the seemingly deliberate demolition of the United Kingdom and its economy? From a Tory perspective, things must have reached a sorry pass when the sole voice speaking up for the Union belongs to Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party. However much energy the Leave campaign put into stirring up nationalist and anti-immigration sentiment, it is hard to see the Westminster Brexiteers as nationalists when they show so little regard for the integrity of the UK or its governing institutions. If the economic forecasts are remotely accurate, Brexit will render England, let alone the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a hoax nation. The most regionally imbalanced nation in Europe will become even more so, as the North suffers yet further decline while the South East holds on. Much of South Wales and Northern Ireland will exist in a parallel economic universe to London.
What do they want, these Brexiteers? The fantasies of hardliners such as Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg are based on dimly learned lessons from British history. The mantra of ‘Global Britain’ resurrects an ideal of laissez-faire from the era of Manchester cotton mills and New World slavery. Discussing the range of Brexit options at a Tory conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he complained that Britain was investing in a vision of national isolation that Churchill had played up (and vastly exaggerated) in his wartime rhetoric.2
Do they even believe the myth, or is it an expedient way of bashing opponents while pursuing some ulterior goal? Historical re-enactment may be fine for the Daily Mail and the grassroots, but it doesn’t seem a strong enough motivation to support a professional political career. We need to know not just what kind of past the Brexiteers imagine, but what kind of future they are after. One disconcerting possibility is that figures such as Hannan and Rees-Mogg might be willing to believe the dismal economic forecasts, but look on them as an attraction.
This isn’t as implausible as it may sound. Since the 1960s, conservatism has been defined partly by a greater willingness to inflict harm, especially in the English-speaking world. The logic is that the augmentation of the postwar welfare state by the moral pluralism of the 1960s produced an acute problem of ‘moral hazard’, whereby benign policies ended up being taken for granted and abused. Once people believe things can be had for free and take pleasure in abundance, there is a risk of idleness and hedonism. In the United States, this fear was expressed in the cultural conservatism of the Nixon era, during which moral opprobrium was visited on welfare claimants and feckless liberals. The focus was on race and gender: in the conservative imaginary, compassion would be exploited in the economic realm by black women, and in the judicial realm by black men. In Britain, there was more emphasis on the language of economics, specifically the ‘supply side’ idea that the interests of investors and entrepreneurs were paramount. As the theory behind Thatcherism had it, government services shrink everybody’s incentives to produce, compete and invest. They reduce the motivation for businesses to deliver services, and ordinary people’s desire to work. Toughness, even pain, performs an important moral and psychological function in pushing people to come up with solutions.
This style of thinking drove Thatcher through the vicious recession of the early 1980s. It was encapsulated by Norman Tebbit in his conference speech in 1981, often misquoted: ‘I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.’ That would imply that economic hardship should produce a more mobile population, and perhaps further abandonment of deindustrialised regions. A more interventionist version of such thinking appeared with the development of ‘workfare’ programmes by the Clinton and Blair governments of the 1990s, which sought to repurpose the welfare state as a means of boosting claimants’ ‘employability’ as well as their efforts to find work. Under workfare schemes, benefits were either paid to those already in work in the form of ‘tax credits’, or made conditional on enrolment in training programmes and constant job-hunting. The old British idea of the ‘dole’ (or in America of ‘welfare’), as something that was an alternative to work, was quickly eradicated. And there was a new iteration under David Cameron and George Osborne, in the form of austerity. The hypothesis of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’, touted by Osbornites during the first years of the Coalition Government, is that cuts to public spending can lead to economic growth, by creating more opportunities for the private sector to invest. As most economists predicted, the hypothesis turned out to be false, but thanks partly to the workfare policies left behind by New Labour, levels of unemployment under austerity didn’t reach those of the Thatcher recession, and Theresa May’s government achieved the lowest unemployment rate since the mid-1970s. An alternative perspective on that achievement is that hardship has forced people into worse jobs, demanding fewer skills and lower capital investment, so that Britain’s productivity growth has stalled to a degree not seen since the Industrial Revolution. That is what happens when work is framed as a moral duty, to be engaged in at all costs.
The fear of ‘moral hazard’ produces a punitive approach to debtors, be they households, firms or national governments, the assumption being that anything short of harshness will produce a downward spiral of generosity, forgiveness and free-riding, eventually making the market economy unviable. Osborne liked to claim (against all the evidence coming from the bond markets) that if Britain kept borrowing, lenders would lose trust in the moral rectitude of the government and interest rates would rise. Gratification must be resisted. Pain works. Only pain forces people to adapt and innovate. In practice that may mean all sorts of things: migrating, reskilling, sacrificing weekends or family time, selling property, the ‘gig economy’ and so on. The productiveness of pain is a central conservative belief, whose expression might be economic, but whose logic is deeply moralistic.
There seems little doubt that for many of Thatcher’s followers the free market experiment hasn’t gone far enough. As long as there is an NHS, a welfare state and a public sector that is more European than American in scale, we will never truly discover what the British people are made of, because they will never be forced to find out. Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, has often voiced the opinion that America’s only hope of moral cleansing lies in war. Tory Brexiteers tend not to go that far, but they may well be holding out for a milder version of the same idea, an extreme of economic hardship that means government is no longer capable of picking up the pieces. No wonder families in County Durham or the Welsh Valleys have experienced multiple generations of unemployment, they argue: there’s been adequate unemployment benefit. The estimated £80 billion hit to the public finances caused by Brexit might change that. And that’s before we take up the suggestive comment lurking in the official forecasts that ‘leaving the European Union could provide the UK with an opportunity to regulate differently across social, environmental, energy, consumer and product standards’.3
The optimistic version of this story is that it’s only when the chips are down that we discover what people are truly capable of. Brexit might reveal reserves of courage and innovation that have lain dormant for decades, held back by the interferences of bureaucracy and public spending. And if it doesn’t? Well, then the truth is laid bare. Perhaps that will be the moment for a more heroic form of political leadership to rise from the ashes. Several prominent Tory Brexiteers, including Iain Duncan Smith and Steve Baker, have military backgrounds. As with the Second World War, Brexit will perform an X-ray of our collective moral fibre. Remainers love facts, but are afraid of the truth.
This is, I suspect, as close to a Conservative ideology of Brexit as exists. At the very least, it has some internal coherence, whatever it may lack in detail regarding the future. But we shouldn’t exaggerate the coherence of Tory Brexit. The situation is a mess, one aspect of which is the frightening lack of responsibility displayed by its main instigators. The political weather in Westminster has been made over the past two years by Boris Johnson, a man whose only apparent goal is to make the political weather. Senior Leave campaigners, such as Dominic Cummings, admit they would have lost the referendum had Johnson not leaped on board. He approaches public life as a game in which he commits sackable offences as a way of demonstrating his unsackability. The office of foreign secretary in this administration is treated as a leash to constrain someone who would otherwise cause more trouble to the prime minister elsewhere.
Johnson is as close as British politics has to a Trump problem, and his seniority suggests that Trumpism has permeated our political culture more deeply than we like to admit. Trump may be a more acute case, but both men compel all around them to react to their idle remarks, mistakes and fantasies. On the day President Macron visited Britain, to take just one recent example, Johnson declared that he wanted to build a bridge across the Channel, and that became the headline. Trump and Johnson are ‘real-time’ politicians: they dominate the rolling news cycle, and devalue the painstaking aspect of politics in the process. Psychologically, they are inverses: Trump has no sense of humour, where Johnson sees the funny side of everything. Johnson is said to strut around Whitehall asking civil servants if they’ve found his £350 million a week yet: ‘I know it exists because it was written on my bus.’ Ha ha. No doubt men such as Johnson and Trump have always existed, but healthy political systems have ways of keeping them away from the highest echelons of power.
For all his idiosyncrasies, Johnson typifies something about contemporary conservatism, which might best be understood biographically. The cultural forces shaping the new conservatism resolve in a particular stereotype: men born between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, with some constellation of expat backgrounds, famous fathers and first careers in the media. All four things apply to Johnson, but a Venn diagram of these various characteristics would also include Michael Gove, Douglas Carswell, Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The result of these disparate characteristics is a comfortable familiarity with the myths and rituals of the British State, but a blasé indifference to the impact of policy. The expat perspective seems to play an important role in the psychology of Brexit. Hannan and Carswell both had expatriate childhoods. Astute observers have argued that Brexit rests more on an imperial imaginary than on a national one. But as much as anything the expat is in a position to see ‘Great Britain’ from a perspective other than that of government. Such things as statistics, macroeconomics and policy itself fade into insignificance compared to the way the nation is seen from afar, alongside its historical rivals. Ignore ‘official Treasury forecasts’ and focus on the atlas instead.
In contrast to the populist message of UKIP, which is all about British blood, British soil and how the elites have betrayed them, Tory Brexitism can have a strange flippancy about it. In some cases, you wonder if they really mean it or if it’s just another attention-seeking strategy. Like Johnson, Rees-Mogg was treated as a joke until suddenly he was being discussed as a potential Conservative leader. Then there are their allies who write in the Spectator and specialise in exploring the sliver of political space between irony and bigotry. Among them is Toby Young, who originally found fame as the butt of his own joke with his memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. The game is a quest for attention, and humorous transgression is the key skill in winning it. Another name for it is ‘trolling’.
Armchair psychoanalysts can muse on what responsibility the high-profile fathers of these men have for cultivating their sons’ delinquency and need for attention. It is surely a safer psychological force confined to op-ed pages than unleashed on politics, especially where historic constitutional reform is at stake. But the boundary separating the conservative press from the Conservative Party has in any case been slowly dissolving, with the Times (Gove’s former employer, which currently boasts two Conservative peers, Lords Finkelstein and Ridley, on its comment team) occupying a particularly porous position on the border between the two. In January 2018, Young came within a Twitter-storm of being appointed to the new Office for Students, which will regulate universities in England and Wales. The reality is that in addition to the ideological and cultural forces behind Brexit, it is also happening thanks to the recklessness of individuals who see public life as an opportunity to show off. This is the more fundamental sense in which Westminster is being permeated by Trumpism.
These men’s contemporaries on the centre-left had the existential fortune of beginning their careers in tandem with Blairism. The likes of Ed Balls, David Miliband and Andy Burnham threw themselves into the details of policy design and implementation, with a level of technocratic commitment that would eventually provoke populist derision from both left and right. No doubt this clique contained some planet-sized egos too, but one thing that can be said for the New Labour generation is that they saw politics as a serious business, requiring hard, serious work. Among Tory Brexiteers, by contrast, ignorance and a lack of effort is taken almost as a mark of distinction – how else to explain David Davis? Having spent so long witnessing the Blairite policy machine churn out evidence and evaluations, year after year, with impeccable economic logic, it’s as if they have abandoned such dull, humourless pursuits altogether. Hence their disdain for the Treasury and for the man, ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ Hammond, who runs it.
In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Edward Bernays, the creator of modern public relations (and Sigmund Freud’s nephew), expressed his optimism that expert communication strategies could protect democracy from the psychological excesses of mass society (it is sometimes forgotten that Bernays saw ‘propaganda’ as a positive and civilising force). Modern democracy would have to draw on the most advanced techniques of communication and persuasion, just as modern business had done with advertising, if the masses were to be satisfied with the policies and leaders that were available.
Bernays believed that politicians struggle to understand the importance of communication strategy, because they never have to struggle hard enough to win public attention. Unlike businesses, which have to work hard to attract publicity, political parties and politicians get attention from the media regardless of how well thought-out their message is. Bernays believed there was a risk that mass democracies would come undone unless politicians gave more thought to how they presented themselves in the media. Recent history suggests that he was worrying about the wrong thing. The professionalisation of politics and the rise of spin led to the opposite problem: politicians began to think too carefully about how they presented themselves in the media. The image management of the Blair and Clinton era smacked of inauthenticity, a charge that was later levelled at mainstream political parties in general, leading to the populist upheavals of the past few years.
But there is a further risk lurking in Bernays’s analysis, which he seemingly didn’t anticipate. If professional politicians have an unearned advantage over others when it comes to attracting public attention, there is a danger that politics comes to attract people who only want public attention – such as Johnson – and others who only know how to exploit it, such as Rees-Mogg. While Rees-Mogg may be a firm believer in the Victorian moral vision of Brexit, there can be no denying that his currently elevated status is largely down to the fact that he is recognisable and provides good media ‘content’. When the media report his latest comments, it’s because he is someone whom everyone recognises from the media. Everything he says or does must be calculated to ensure that this remains the case. As any troll understands, wit and disruption are the best tactics for succeeding in the ‘attention economy’.
It would be almost reassuring to know that there was an ideology of Tory Brexit that was driving things, just as there is an ideology known as ‘Lexit’ which views the EU as an anti-democratic neoliberal institution that must be resisted. But for the generation who entered public life in the 1990s, after the ‘end of ideology’, there were only two choices: to devote oneself with immense earnestness to the nitty-gritty of policy and economics, or to revel in the freedom of symbolism and storytelling, as journalists, PR professionals and pranksters. Political careers came later. Britain’s misfortune is that matters of the greatest seriousness are now in the hands of basically unserious people.
The Windrush Nightmare
‘Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.’ We never find out whether or not the opening line of The Trial is true, or what the lies might have been. Instead we are led into a suffocating world of innuendo and gossip, which slowly builds towards a judicial decision that doesn’t in the end arrive. Unable to discover what he’s been accused of, Josef K. focuses on trying to navigate a system that is as senseless as it is cruel, ultimately without success. The world portrayed in The Trial is one in which judiciary and bureaucracy have collapsed into each other. The intimidating symbolism of the courtroom is married to the pettiness and absurdity of bureaucracy, creating a web that traps the book’s hero for no clear reason. It isn’t so much that he is suffering an injustice, as that he can barely work out what the justice system wants of him or how he might provide it. The real trial is the constant process, rather than the hearing itself.
It is difficult to imagine anything more Kafkaesque than the experience the ‘Windrush generation’ has undergone at the hands of the British state in the past few years. Cases are accumulating of people seeking NHS treatment, passports, jobs or housing only to find themselves having to prove their right to live in the country where they have been legally resident for more than forty-five years, or risk being deported. Harrowing stories have emerged of individuals being made homeless, jobless and stateless, after they failed to produce proof they were never given in the first place. One man suffered an aneurysm which he believes was brought on by the stress the situation caused him, only to be presented with a bill for £5,000 for his NHS treatment – again because his paperwork didn’t measure up – while also losing his job and his home. He was left on the street. As it turns out, the one source of evidence that might have put a stop to this torture – the landing cards that recorded arrivals from the Caribbean until the 1960s – was destroyed by the Home Office in 2010.
The Windrush generation’s immigration status should never have been in question, and the cause of their predicament is recent: the 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’ that would make it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status checks, the policy pushed the mentality of border control into everyday social and economic life. The 2016 Immigration Act extended it further, introducing tougher penalties for employers and landlords who fail to play their part in maintaining the ‘hostile environment’, and adding to the list of privileges that can be taken away from those who cannot prove their right to live and work in the UK.
Another key feature of the 2014 Act was that it empowered the Home Office to deport people more quickly and cheaply, avoiding lengthy and repeated appeals. The ‘deport first, appeal later’ provision was eventually ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court. The Act greatly restricted the right to appeal via tribunal, replacing most appeals with an administrative review carried out by the Home Office itself. Before the Act was introduced, 50 per cent of appeals were upheld at tribunal; at administrative review, the figure is 18 per cent.
Immigration policy necessarily involves complex alliances and tensions between legal and bureaucratic logic. People move across national borders for any number of reasons, and practicality (not to mention compassion) requires that these be recognised in a variety of different visas and entitlements. The Home Office is under constant pressure, not least from other parts of Whitehall, to recognise the needs of business, universities and the economy as a whole, and therefore to let valued migrants into the UK, at least for a period of time. The nature of Britain’s economy and labour market means that immigration law cannot be cleanly separated from issues of employment, welfare, health and education. One of the dangers of the ‘hostile environment’ policy is that it deliberately collapses the distinction between judicial due process and bureaucratic administration. It’s almost as if, on discovering that law alone was too blunt an instrument for deterring and excluding immigrants, May decided to weaponise paperwork instead. The ‘hostile environment’ strategy was never presented just as an effective way of identifying and deporting illegal immigrants: more important, it was intended as a way of destroying their ability to build normal lives. The hope, it seemed, was that people might decide that living in Britain wasn’t worth the hassle.
The policy has echoes of the ‘benefit sanctions’ regime the Coalition Government introduced in 2012 to penalise ‘jobseekers’ who failed to meet specific conditions such as attending daily appointments at job centres. Claimants have had their income cut off at a moment’s notice for reasons that were beyond their control: one man was sanctioned for nine weeks after having a heart attack on the day of his appointment. The thread linking benefit sanctions and the ‘hostile environment’ is that both are policies designed to alter behaviour dressed up as audits. Neither is really concerned with accumulating information per se: the idea is to use a process of constant auditing to punish and deter. If it seems senseless, that’s the point (as Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘To use reason when reason is used as a trap is not “rational”’).4 The Coalition Government was fond of the idea of ‘nudges’, interventions that seek to change behaviour by subtle manipulation of the way things look and feel, rather than through regulation. Nudgers celebrate the sunnier success stories, such as getting more people to recycle or to quit smoking, but it’s easy to see how the same mentality might be applied in a more menacing way. Policies such as the creation of a ‘hostile environment’ work by cultivating anxiety among those they target, in tandem with campaigns such as the quickly aborted ‘Go Home’ vans introduced on Britain’s streets in August 2013 in an effort to persuade illegal immigrants to hand themselves in.
One problem with governing via mood is that there is no precise way of controlling who you affect and how. It’s no good saying that the innocent have nothing to fear: fear doesn’t work like that. In any case, the argument for creating a ‘hostile environment’ rests on the assumption that legal and illegal residents are prima facie indistinguishable, and can only be separated through constant hounding. The Home Office’s frustration with the courts is that they place the burden of proof on the state. The 2014 Act sought to shift it onto the individual. If, like members of the Windrush generation, you can’t prove you are British, you become de facto illegal.
Another problem with governing via mood is that the effect of policy becomes a subjective matter. This is where racism comes in. The ‘hostile environment’ and associated campaigns don’t have to be conceived and designed by racists in order to look, feel and be racist, especially given certain family resemblances between these policies and everyday racist practices of the past. Granting landlords additional powers to evict tenants who can’t prove their legal status (as the 2016 Immigration Act did), or plastering the words ‘Go Home’ across a billboard, creates a sense of déjà vu.
The ‘Go Home’ vans, which were introduced along with a range of other Home Office information campaigns challenging the image of Britain (and its public services) as a soft touch, had two different audiences in mind. First, those it hoped to persuade to ‘go home’. The Home Office can cover the cost of illegal immigrants leaving the country, and wanted to get the message out there. The problem was that May and her advisers feared this might look over-generous. They were more mindful of a second audience: the voters and the Daily Mail. This is what caused the messaging to be toughened up, until it (deliberately or otherwise) revived a notorious bit of racist graffiti from the 1970s.
The ultimate ambition of the Home Office in all of this is to reduce the number of people living illegally in the UK. Under May, it pursued this goal with a set of techniques designed to comfort a majority and frighten a minority. But whether an individual falls into the first or the second camp doesn’t depend only on their legal status. It is also a matter of how settled and welcome they feel in the UK, not to mention their capacity to produce paperwork. Nobody has suffered from this policy as badly as the Windrush victims, but countless British citizens of colour will have seen pictures of the vans, been asked for additional paperwork by landlords (perhaps more often than their white counter-parts), and wondered if, deep down, this country really wants them. The news of the past month will have deepened their anxiety.
Is the prime minister a racist? It’s a provocative question that has been asked repeatedly since Home Office rhetoric on illegal immigration was ratcheted up around 2012. Her 2016 party conference speech, containing its infamous dismissal of ‘citizens of nowhere’, raised the question once more. Lord Kerslake, head of the civil service between 2012 and 2014, has said that some inside the government saw May’s immigration policies as ‘almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany’. But reducing the current situation to the politics or prejudices of an individual doesn’t really explain how Britain descended to the point where black citizens were being stripped of their dignity and livelihoods, and threatened with being slung out of the country. This isn’t just a matter of something rotten in the Home Office, as Amber Rudd had the nerve to suggest. That we have ended up in this mess suggests that senior politicians have gradually lost all sense of proportion on the matter. Someone must have been telling lies about immigration.
The tabloid media are culpable, with their talk of ‘floods’ and ‘swarms’, happily echoed by Nigel Farage. But the most significant precursor to the ‘hostile environment’ was David Cameron’s ill-fated pledge of 2010 to reduce net migration (the number entering the UK minus the number leaving) to less than 100,000 a year, at a time when the figure was more than 250,000. New Labour had treated immigration merely as a labour market issue, without much political significance. Cameron’s policy was a desperate bid to hang on to voters who might drift towards UKIP, but it was wildly undeliverable. The government soon introduced a cap on the number of skilled non-EU migrants that could enter the country, which was broken month after month.
Between the Blair and May governments, the source of immigration changed substantially. Only 13 per cent of people entering Britain between 2000 and 2003 came from the European Union. By 2015, almost half were from the EU, which meant that the power of the Home Office to limit the number of arrivals was falling fast. Yet Cameron reiterated his pledge (downgraded to an ‘ambition’) at the 2015 election, by which point net migration was close to 300,000 a year. Cameron was backing himself to persuade the EU to make an exception for Britain in relation to free movement, which he could then use as the basis to win a referendum on EU membership. The first wager ended in farce and the second in tragedy.
What does any of this have to do with the ‘hostile environment’? The net migration numbers obviously don’t capture the number of people entering the country illegally in the backs of lorries. There is no data on how many people get into the country that way, though a pessimistic report by the think-tank Civitas put the number at 40,000 a year (based on figures from the summer of 2015 for the number being caught – at the time, 1,000 per month). While it is politically expedient for the Home Office to conjure images of criminals and people-trafficking when unveiling their latest crackdown, the people ensnared by the ‘hostile environment’ policy rarely fit this profile. Most will have entered the country legally for work, study or tourism, but outstayed their visa or abused its terms. Many will be honestly unsure of their exact status. Some of the rules are so complicated, and the financial cost of navigating them so high, that people are unable to discover or prove their status conclusively, no matter how hard they try.
In a politically desperate situation, with Cameron having repeatedly pledged to deliver the impossible, May put forward two measures that would reduce the net migration rate. First, hounding people to provide paperwork at every turn would reduce the likelihood that immigrants would make a life for themselves in the UK. If you can’t limit the number of people coming into the country legally, then maybe you can boost the number going out. Second, casting doubt on people’s legal status: ‘sham marriages’, fake colleges and dodgy employers would be unmasked. The number of legal routes into the country can be restricted by exposing some of them as not so legal after all. The trademark Home Office suspicion that the law on its own is too generous and open to abuse has made it a matter of border enforcement to address such thorny questions as what constitutes a real marriage, or who is a real student. This is an area ripe for legal challenge and embarrassment, as doubt is cast on legitimate practices as well as less legitimate ones. In March 2016, a court ruled that the Home Office had behaved unlawfully in deporting thousands of foreign students accused of cheating in an English language test, when the only evidence against any of them was the confession of the firm that administered the test. The students, who were mostly Indian, had been rounded up in dawn raids and deported without the right to appeal.
In total, the Home Office manages to remove around 40,000 people from the UK every year, either forcibly or through ‘voluntary departure’ (what the ‘Go Home’ vans were ostensibly seeking to encourage). This number includes those who have got as far as a British airport or port, but have then been refused entry. No doubt the number could go higher as additional hostility and extra-legal measures are threaded into civil society and the economy. As the Windrush scandal unfolded, it emerged that the Home Office has internal targets for the number of ‘voluntary departures’, raising the pressure on its staff to track down anyone whose documents aren’t in perfect order. But at what point will a home secretary place a cap on the level of fear and paranoia they are willing to manufacture? The suffering of the Windrush generation is not a result of administrative ‘incompetence’, as defenders of the ‘hostile environment’ have argued. The system exists to harass people who are trying to live ordinary, non-criminal lives.
Net migration will fall only when fewer people want to come to the UK, and when universities, employers and the tourist industry stop inviting them. Thanks to Brexit, the first of these things is already happening: net migration suddenly fell by a third in the year following the referendum. The worry is that if ‘hostile environment’ policies are sustained after Brexit, they will start to affect EU citizens who (like the Windrush generation) entered the country with unambiguous rights, so never built up the paperwork needed to document them.
There is nothing accidental about the grotesque events that have befallen the Windrush generation. We need to ask how public policy and administration became so warped as to enact them. Not only has the politics become delusional, nowhere more so than in the case of Cameron’s pledge. Our entire way of understanding and talking about migration has gone awry. When home secretaries speak of ‘illegal immigrants’, they mostly mean people who entered the country legally. When they speak of ‘borders’, they often mean hospitals, homes, workplaces and register offices. As the experience of the twentieth century warned, when language stops working, all manner of things are possible.
The Revenge of Sovereignty on Government
‘I am increasingly admiring of Donald Trump. I have become more and more convinced that there is method in his madness.’ These comments, subsequently leaked, were made in June 2018 by Boris Johnson, who was then Britain’s foreign secretary. Never one to discount praise, Trump reportedly expressed an interest in meeting his ‘friend’ Johnson during his subsequent visit to London, noting that Johnson has been ‘very, very nice to me, very supportive’. When Johnson offered those remarks praising the American president, he was discussing the topic that shapes everything in British politics right now: Brexit. The dilemma that is pulling Prime Minister Theresa May’s government apart, and may yet topple her, is whether Britain opts for a ‘soft’ Brexit, in which it leaves the European Union but retains many of its rules, or a ‘hard’ Brexit, which throws caution to the wind and releases Britain to start all its trading negotiations afresh. In Johnson’s view, it seems, Trump would have no hesitation in choosing the latter. One thing the two men share is a recklessness that looks like courage in the eyes of their supporters, but which also sabotages the work of policymaking and diplomacy.
May’s most recent attempt to escape the ‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ dilemma involves establishing a ‘common rule book’ shared by London and Brussels. This looks far too ‘soft’ for the liking of fervent Eurosceptics in her party. Within forty-eight hours of the plan being revealed, Johnson had resigned. Before him, so had David Davis, another prominent Brexiteer in May’s cabinet who had been put in charge of negotiating with the European Union. In characteristically florid terms, Johnson’s resignation letter expressed fears that ‘we are headed for the status of a colony’.
Just to further destabilise an already fragile political situation, Trump’s visit was accompanied by an incendiary interview with the Sun.5 Confirming Johnson’s assessment, while escalating the mutual admiration between the two men, Trump declared that May’s plan would ‘kill’ any future trade deal between Britain and the United States, and that Johnson would ‘make a great prime minister’. On the lengthy efforts of May’s government to arrive at a compromise with Brussels, Trump scoffed that ‘deals that take too long are never good ones’.
Like so many political metaphors, the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ is misleading. Any Brexiteer wanting to perform machismo will reach for the ‘hard’ option. But as has become increasingly plain over the past two years, nobody has any idea what ‘hard’ Brexit actually means in policy terms. It is not so much hard as abstract. ‘Soft’ Brexit might sound weak or half-hearted, but it is also the only policy proposal that might actually work. What appear on the surface to be policy disputes over Britain’s relationship with Brussels are actually fundamental conflicts regarding the very nature of political power. In this, the arguments underway inside Britain’s Conservative Party speak of a deeper rift within liberal democracies today, which shows no sign of healing. In conceptual terms, this is a conflict between those who are sympathetic to government and those striving to reassert sovereignty.
When we speak of government, we refer to the various technical and bureaucratic means by which policies and plans are delivered. Government involves officials, data-gathering, regulating and evaluating. As a governmental issue, Brexit involves prosaic problems such as how to get trucks through ports. Sovereignty, on the other hand, is always an abstract notion of where power ultimately lies, albeit an abstraction that modern states depend on if they’re to command obedience. As a sovereign issue, Brexit involves bravado appeals to ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’. These are two incommensurable ideas of what power consists of, although any effective state must have both at its disposal.
One way to understand the rise of reactionary populism today is as the revenge of sovereignty on government. This is a backlash not simply against decades of globalisation, but against the form of political power that facilitated it, which is technocratic, multilateral and increasingly divorced from local identities. A common thread linking ‘hard’ Brexiteers to nationalists across the globe is that they resent the very idea of governing as a complex, modern, fact-based set of activities that requires technical expertise and permanent officials. Soon after entering the White House as President Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon expressed the hope that the newly appointed cabinet would achieve the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’. In Europe, the European Commission – which has copious governmental capacity, but scant sovereignty – is an obvious target for nationalists such as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
The more extreme fringes of British conservatism have now reached the point that American conservatives first arrived at during the Clinton administration: they are seeking to undermine the very possibility of workable government. For hardliners such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, it is an article of faith that Britain’s Treasury Department, the Bank of England and Downing Street itself are now conspiring to deny Britain its sovereignty. It is thought that David Davis’s real grudge was with the unelected official, Olly Robbins, who had usurped him in his influence over the Brexit process. The problem was that Mr Robbins is willing and able to do the laborious and intellectually demanding policy work that Brexit will require, while Mr Davis is famously not.
What happens if sections of the news media, the political classes and the public insist that only sovereignty matters and that the complexities of governing are a lie invented by liberal elites? For one thing, it gives rise to celebrity populists, personified by Trump, whose inability to engage patiently or intelligently with policy issues makes it possible to sustain the fantasy that governing is simple. What Johnson terms the ‘method’ in Trump’s ‘madness’ is a refusal to listen to inconvenient evidence, of the sort provided by officials and experts.
But another by-product of the anti-government attitude is a constant wave of exits. Britain leaves the European Union, Johnson resigns from the cabinet. The Trump White House has been defined by the constant churn of sackings and resignations. With astonishing hypocrisy, wealthy Brexiteers such as Rees-Mogg, John Redwood, Lord Lawson and Lord Ashcroft have all been discovered either preparing to move their own assets into European Union jurisdictions or advising clients on how to do so. No doubt when Britain does finally leave the European Union, they will distance themselves from reality once more, allowing the sense of victimhood and the dream of ‘sovereignty’ to live another day. Meanwhile, someone has to keep governing.
The Lure of Exit
It is received wisdom about referendums that ‘yes’ has an advantage over ‘no’. Alex Salmond didn’t get the wording he wanted for the 2014 Scottish independence referendum – the Electoral Commission considered ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ too much of a leading question – but he did at least make sure that his side would be fighting for a ‘yes’. The campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland, which won with a thumping ‘yes’ vote in last year’s referendum, was a masterclass in positivity. Britain’s EU referendum was not a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Even so, the government may have reassured themselves that ‘leave’ carried more negative resonances than ‘remain’. Leave … and go where exactly? What kind of affirmation is leave? What kind of identity or vision does it assert? But among the many things unreckoned with by David Cameron’s government, when it initiated Britain’s current political disaster, was the extent to which voters were up for a bit of negativity.
The vote for Brexit was a ‘no’ to many things: wage stagnation, mass immigration, local government cuts, Brussels, London, Westminster, multiculturalism, ‘political correctness’ and who knows what else. Political scientists and pollsters can spend as much time as they like disentangling one factor from another in an effort to isolate the really decisive one, but Leave’s greatest advantage was that it didn’t have to specify exactly what was being left. As the gilets jaunes in France have shown, ‘no’ has the capacity to mobilise a more disparate movement than ‘yes’, without the need for any consensus on what is being negated. Leave was a coalition of rejecters, a great refusal that didn’t require a positive or viable programme in order to flourish.
In his book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour spots a pattern in this instinct to leave that is far from unique to Britain. Underlying it, he thinks, is a fantasy of escape, ultimately from a shared planet that is becoming less habitable. ‘We can understand nothing about the politics of the last fifty years’, he writes, ‘if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and centre.’6 This isn’t to say that all politics is now about carbon dioxide emissions, but that all politics is now terrestrial: there is a finite (and shrinking) amount of firm ground available, and the problem of how to share and conserve it is growing. As for Brexit, ‘the country that had invented the wide-open space of the market on the sea as well as on land, the country that had ceaselessly pushed the European Union to be nothing but a huge shop; this very country, facing the sudden arrival of thousands of refugees, decided on impulse to stop playing the game of globalisation’.7
The British do not lack for people wanting to tell them who they are. Whether these opinions have come from the most credible sources is doubtful. Too much attention has been paid to whiggish, conflictless tales of national identity and tradition, and not enough to the insights of those who stand one foot in, one foot out, in particular those with the ambivalent perspective of the once colonised. If it’s never too late to learn, then there should be a rush to the works of Paul Gilroy on Britain’s ‘postcolonial melancholia’, just as there is now an embrace of Fintan O’Toole’s reflections on Britain’s sudden sense of victimhood.
But even this will not bring us face to face with the sheer negativity of Brexit. In the ongoing struggle to make sense of what Brexit is and why it is happening, ample attention has been paid to the ‘Br’, but comparatively little to the ‘exit’. The seductions, myths and affirmations of nationhood are raked through in search of what all this is about. Empire? Race? The Blitz? But what if the answer has been staring us in the face all along? What if there is in British political culture a deep, generalised urge to depart?
What is currently clear is that there is no majority support, either in Parliament or in the country, for the hard graft of actively withdrawing Britain from the European Union. The polls register a consistent lead for Remain in any future referendum on the question (in a YouGov poll on 6 January 2019, the lead was 46 to 39 per cent, with the other 15 per cent so alienated from the whole business that they offer no answer one way or the other). A sufficient number of Leave voters has now had enough of Brexit, or of politics in general, for Remain to stand a plausible chance of winning a second referendum.
Nor is there any conceivable parliamentary majority on the horizon that might support a tangible withdrawal agreement. The extraordinary scale of Theresa May’s defeat on 15 January, by 230 votes, once again demonstrated the power of ‘no’. The 432 MPs who voted against her did so for a variety of reasons, underpinned by incompatible visions of what should happen next. There are few things that could produce consensus between Jeremy Corbyn, Arlene Foster, Vince Cable and Jacob Rees-Mogg, but opposition to May’s deal was one. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, responded to the result with a tweet urging the UK ‘to clarify its intentions as soon as possible’. But what if ‘the UK’ does not possess any intentions right now?
May’s gambit, seen at first as a smart one, of putting leading Brexiteers in critical ministerial positions, has gradually disintegrated thanks to a steady stream of resignations. Boris Johnson’s departure from the Foreign Office was the most eye-catching, but the successive exits of David Davis and Dominic Raab from the office of Brexit secretary conveyed a sense that theirs was an ideology that couldn’t survive its own implementation. The committed Brexiteer knows only one tactic: exit, and when that doesn’t work, exit again.
In his classic treatise from 1970, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, the economic theorist Albert Hirschman articulated the different ways power is exerted in the economy. In principle, competitive markets are systems in which ‘exit’ counts for everything. If I am unhappy with the quality of my washing powder, I can simply decline to buy it again, and choose a different brand in future. If enough consumers do the same, the manufacturer will eventually get the message, and either improve its product or get driven out of the market altogether. In a free market, exit is the default way of expressing oneself.
Hirschman realised that markets never quite match up to this ideal. Often, consumers will make a fuss (Hirschman called this ‘voice’), reporting the problem, demanding a refund or – increasingly nowadays – leaving critical feedback. To take a key example, the relationship between employers and employees can’t simply be abandoned at the first sign of difficulty: it involves negotiation, trust and occasional conflict. In short, there is always a space for politics, even where markets appear to have free rein. By studying the subtle interactions between ‘exit’ and ‘voice’, Hirschman was seeking to understand the entanglement of economics and politics, markets and democracy, in everyday life.
Much of the time, exit and voice are things we hold in reserve, as rights rather than everyday behaviours. Most consumers don’t keep switching their brand of washing powder, any more than most voters continually harangue their MP with demands and complaints. But the point is that we retain the right to do these things, which grants us a modicum of power. And these rights have their own proper domains: exit in the market sphere, voice in the political sphere.
How did the ideology – or the fantasy – of exit engulf British politics? How did a principle that belongs in the marketplace, the principle of expressing dissatisfaction through departure, trigger the greatest constitutional crisis since 1945? Viewed this way, Brexit isn’t so much a celebration of sovereignty or democracy, as a new frontier in the marketisation of politics. It is the fundamental right of any investor, customer or business to leave when it suits them – so why not nations too? As the armchair trade negotiators of the Conservative Party’s European Research Group keep reminding us, you don’t get a good deal on anything unless you’re willing to walk away.
Hirschman noted that consumers or businessmen who become too accustomed to withdrawing can gradually forget how to assert themselves in any other way: ‘The presence of the exit alternative can therefore tend to atrophy the development of the art of voice.’8 Perhaps the inverse is true in the democratic arena: where the art of voice has atrophied too much, there is an increasing appetite for the exit alternative. This isn’t to say that the European Commission has ever been very open to ‘voice’, least of all a popular one. One of Cameron’s worst strategic errors in committing to a referendum in January 2013 was to promise a major unilateral renegotiation of Britain’s EU membership, which Brussels was never going to accept.
But voice had been atrophying across British society for decades before 2016.9 Trade union membership in the UK peaked at more than 50 per cent of the workforce in 1979, but has since declined to just 23 per cent. The mantra of ‘choice’ and ‘competition’ in public services, which was central to New Labour’s modernisation programme, rested on the assumption that improvements could come about only once service users had powers of exit similar to the ones they had in the private sector. The turn-out in the 1992 general election was 78 per cent; nine years later, it was 59 per cent.
Developing alongside these trends was a new political common sense about globalisation and the rising mobility of capital, and of the businesses and rich individuals that control it. One of the chief worries of policymakers from the mid-1980s onwards was that of capital flight of one kind or another. Banks and their employees might up sticks and move to Geneva; the super-rich could park their money offshore; the bond markets would grow suspicious of public spending plans, and interest rates would rise; celebrities, such as Phil Collins and Tracey Emin, threatened to leave Britain if income tax rose. We are all too conscious of anxieties concerning immigration in British society, yet the latent fear of emigration – by capital and capitalists – has shaped our politics far more decisively over the past thirty or forty years.
Contemporary forms of financial speculation are characterised by an even more radical assertion of exit rights. The mentality of the high-frequency trader or hedge fund manager is wholly focused on leaving on better terms than those on which one arrived, and on minimising the delay or friction in between. To the speculator, falling prices present just as lucrative an opportunity as rising prices, meaning that instability in general is attractive. As long as nothing ever stays the same, you can exit better off than when you entered. The only unprofitable scenario is stasis.
Private investment funds have been a constant feature of Britain’s descent into political turmoil, though their precise role remains murky. The American hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a friend of Nigel Farage, was accused of aiding the Leave campaign with data analytics expertise, via the now defunct company Cambridge Analytica. Hedge funds were generous backers of both the Leave and Remain campaigns in 2016, but both sides extracted handsome rewards from the financial turmoil that immediately followed the result. Questions were raised about the relationships between polling companies and hedge funds on the day of the referendum, with fears that pollsters were passing on sensitive information to private clients, to give them first-mover advantage. Bloomberg reported last June that when Farage made his peculiar concession of defeat on the night of the referendum result, he may already have been in possession of polling data from Survation – privately commissioned by multiple clients including hedge funds – which predicted that Leave would win. His announcement briefly buoyed the pound, increasing the profits of any speculators correctly predicting its imminent collapse. The discovery that the fund co-founded by Rees-Mogg, Somerset Capital, was setting up operations in Dublin smacked of ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ hypocrisy.
Even in the absence of such cynical financial chicanery, there is a certain family resemblance between the logic of the hedge fund and that of hardcore Brexiteers. The hedge fund manager ‘shorts’ the falling currency or stock, turning failure into money; Brexiteers are constantly distancing themselves from the realities of actually existing Brexit. The two share a mentality that is allergic to commitment, political accountability or – Hirschman’s third concept – loyalty. The mindset is infectious, with politicians on every side of the House of Commons currently fixated on short-term moves, seeking to second-guess one another in the hope of benefiting from others’ losses. The difference is that in the realm of financial speculation it is possible to take a position on both sides of a dispute – to hedge against the possibility of being wrong – but in the political realm, to claim that one can exit a set of institutions while continuing to benefit from membership of them is having one’s cake and eating it. Individuals (including Brexiteers and their wealthy donors) can personally hedge against the consequences of exit, moving their assets overseas, applying for foreign citizenship or even emigrating, but the United Kingdom cannot. At some point, politics comes down to affirmations, not refusals.
The Demise of Liberal Elites
For hundreds of years, modern societies have depended on something that is so ubiquitous, so ordinary, that we scarcely ever stop to notice it: trust. The fact that millions of people are able to believe the same things about reality is a remarkable achievement, but one that is more fragile than is often recognised. At times when public institutions – including the media, government departments and professions – command widespread trust, we rarely question how they achieve this. And yet at the heart of successful liberal democracies lies a remarkable collective leap of faith: that when public officials, reporters, experts and politicians share a piece of information, they are presumed to be doing so in an honest fashion.
The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others. If this system is to work, there must be a basic modicum of trust that the small group will act on behalf of the much larger one, at least some of the time. As the past decade has made clear, nothing turns voters against liberalism more rapidly than the appearance of corruption: the suspicion, valid or otherwise, that politicians are exploiting their power for their own private interest.
This isn’t just about politics. In fact, much of what we believe to be true about the world is actually taken on trust, via newspapers, experts, officials and broadcasters. While each of us sometimes witnesses events with our own eyes, there are plenty of apparently reasonable truths that we all accept without seeing. In order to believe that the economy has grown by 1 per cent, or to find out about the latest medical advances, we take various things on trust; we don’t automatically doubt the moral character of the researchers or reporters involved.
Much of the time, the edifice that we refer to as ‘truth’ is really an investment of trust. Consider how we come to know the facts about climate change: scientists carefully collect and analyse data, before drafting a paper for anonymous review by other scientists, who assume that the data is authentic. If published, the findings are shared with journalists in press releases, drafted by university press offices. We expect that these findings are then reported honestly and without distortion by broadcasters and newspapers. Civil servants draft ministerial speeches that respond to these facts, including details on what the government has achieved to date.
A modern liberal society is a complex web of trust relations, held together by reports, accounts, records and testimonies. Such systems have always faced political risks and threats. The template of modern expertise can be traced back to the second half of the seventeenth century, when scientists and merchants first established techniques for recording and sharing facts and figures. These were soon adopted by governments, for the purposes of tax collection and rudimentary public finance. But from the start, strict codes of conduct had to be established to ensure that officials and experts were not seeking personal gain or glory (for instance through exaggerating their scientific discoveries), and were bound by strict norms of honesty.
But regardless of how honest parties may be in their dealings with one another, the cultural homogeneity and social intimacy of these gentlemanly networks and clubs has always been grounds for suspicion. Throughout modern history, the bodies tasked with handling public knowledge have always privileged white male graduates, living in global cities and university towns. This does not discredit the knowledge they produce – but where things get trickier is when that homogeneity starts to appear to be a political identity, with a shared set of political goals. This is what is implied by the concept of ‘elites’: that purportedly separate domains of power – media, business, politics, law, academia – are acting in unison.
A further threat comes from individuals taking advantage of their authority for personal gain. Systems that rely on trust are always open to abuse by those seeking to exploit them. It is a key feature of modern administrations that they use written documents to verify things, but there will always be scope for records to be manipulated, suppressed or fabricated. There is no escaping that possibility altogether. This applies to many fields: at a certain point, the willingness to trust that a newspaper is honestly reporting what a police officer claims to have been told by a credible witness, for example, relies on a leap of faith.
A trend of declining trust has been underway across the Western world for many years, even decades, as copious survey evidence attests. Trust, and its absence, became a preoccupation for policymakers and business leaders during the 1990s and early 2000s. They feared that shrinking trust led to higher rates of crime and less cohesive communities, producing costs that would be picked up by the state. What nobody foresaw was that, when trust sinks beneath a certain point, many people may come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham. This happens not because trust in general declines, but because key public figures – notably politicians and journalists – are perceived as untrustworthy. It is those figures specifically tasked with representing society, either as elected representatives or as professional reporters, who have lost credibility.
To understand the crisis liberal democracy faces today – whether we identify this primarily in terms of ‘populism’ or ‘post-truth’ – it’s not enough simply to bemoan the rising cynicism of the public. We need also to consider some of the reasons why trust has been withdrawn. The infrastructure of fact has been undermined in part by a combination of technology and market forces – but we must seriously reckon with the underlying truth of the populists’ charge against the establishment today. Too often, the rise of insurgent political parties and demagogues is viewed as the source of liberalism’s problems, rather than as a symptom. But by focusing on trust, and the failure of liberal institutions to sustain it, we get a clearer sense of why this is happening now.
The problem today is that, across a number of crucial areas of public life, the basic intuitions of populists have been repeatedly verified. One of the main contributors to this has been the spread of digital technology, creating vast data trails with the latent potential to contradict public statements, and even undermine entire public institutions. Whereas it is impossible to conclusively prove that a politician is morally innocent or that a news report is undistorted, it is far easier to demonstrate the opposite. Scandals, leaks, whistleblowers and revelations of fraud all serve to confirm our worst suspicions. While trust relies on a leap of faith, distrust is supported by ever-mounting piles of evidence. And in Britain, this pile has been expanding much faster than many of us have been prepared to admit.
Confronted by the rise of populist parties and leaders, some commentators have described the crisis facing liberalism in largely economic terms – as a revolt among those ‘left behind’ by inequality and globalisation. Another camp sees it primarily as the expression of cultural anxieties surrounding identity and immigration. There is some truth in both, of course, but neither gets to the heart of the trust crisis that populists exploit so ruthlessly. A crucial reason liberalism is in danger right now is that the basic honesty of mainstream politicians, journalists and senior officials is no longer taken for granted.
There are copious explanations for Trump, Brexit and so on, but insufficient attention to what populists are actually saying, which focuses relentlessly on the idea of self-serving ‘elites’ maintaining a status quo that primarily benefits them. On the right, Nigel Farage has accused individual civil servants of seeking to sabotage Brexit for their own private ends. On the left, Jeremy Corbyn repeatedly refers to Britain’s ‘rigged’ economic system. The promise to crack down on corruption and private lobbying is integral to the pitch made by figures such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or Viktor Orbán.
One of the great political riddles of recent years is that declining trust in ‘elites’ is often encouraged and exploited by figures of far more dubious moral character – not to mention far greater wealth – than the technocrats and politicians being ousted. On the face of it, it would seem odd that a sense of ‘elite’ corruption would play into the hands of hucksters and blaggards such as Donald Trump or Arron Banks. But the authority of these figures owes nothing to their moral character, and everything to their perceived willingness to blow the whistle on corrupt ‘insiders’ dominating the state and media.
Liberals – including those who occupy ‘elite’ positions – may comfort themselves with the belief that these charges are ill-founded or exaggerated, or else that the populists offer no solutions to the failures they identify. After all, Trump has not ‘drained the swamp’ of Washington lobbying. But this is to miss the point of how such rhetoric works, which is to chip away at the core faith on which liberalism depends, namely that power is being used in ways that represent the public interest, and that the facts published by the mainstream media are valid representations of reality.
Populists target various centres of power, including dominant political parties, mainstream media, big business and the institutions of the state, including the judiciary. The chilling phrase ‘enemies of the people’ has recently been employed by Donald Trump to describe those broadcasters and newspapers he dislikes (such as CNN and the New York Times), and by the Daily Mail to describe high court judges, following their 2016 ruling that Brexit would require parliamentary consent. But on a deeper level, whether it is the judiciary, the media or the independent civil service that is being attacked is secondary to a more important allegation: that public life in general has become fraudulent.
How does this allegation work? One aspect of it is to dispute the very possibility that a judge, reporter or expert might act in a disinterested, objective fashion. For those whose authority depends on separating their public duties from their personal feelings, having their private views or identities publicised serves as an attack on their credibility. But another aspect is to gradually blur the distinctions between different varieties of expertise and authority, with the implication that politicians, journalists, judges, regulators and officials are effectively all working together.
It is easy for rival professions to argue that they have little in common with each other, and are often antagonistic to each other. Ostensibly, these disparate centres of expertise and power hold each other in check in various ways, producing a pluralist system of checks and balances. Twentieth-century defenders of liberalism, such as the American political scientist Robert Dahl, often argued that it didn’t matter how much power was concentrated in the hands of individual authorities, as long as no single political entity was able to monopolise power. The famous liberal ideal of a ‘separation of powers’ (distinguishing executive, legislative and judicial branches of government), so influential in the framing of the US constitution, could persist so long as different domains of society hold one another up to critical scrutiny.
But one thing that these diverse professions and authorities do have in common is that they trade primarily in words and symbols. By lumping together journalists, judges, experts and politicians as a single homogeneous ‘liberal elite’, it is possible to treat them all as indulging in a babble of jargon, political correctness and, ultimately, lies. Their status as public servants is demolished once their claim to speak honestly is thrown into doubt. One way in which this is done is by bringing their private opinions and tastes before the public, something that social media and email render far easier. Tensions and contradictions between the public face of, say, a BBC reporter, and their private opinions and feelings, are much easier to discover in the age of Twitter.
Whether in the media, politics or academia, liberal professions suffer a vulnerability that a figure such as Trump doesn’t, in that their authority hangs on their claim to speak the truth. A recent sociological paper by US academics Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, draws a distinction between two types of lies.10 The first, ‘special access lies’, may be better termed ‘insider lies’. This is dishonesty from those trusted to truthfully report facts, who abuse that trust by failing to state what they privately know to be true. (The authors give the example of Bill Clinton’s infamous claim that he ‘did not have sexual relations with that woman’.)
The second, which they refer to as ‘common knowledge lies’, are the kinds of lies told by Donald Trump about the size of his election victory or the crowds at his inauguration, or the Vote Leave campaign’s false claims about sending ‘£350m a week to the EU’. These lies do not pretend to be bound by the norm of honesty in the first place, and the listener can make up their own mind what to make of them.
What the paper shows is that, where politics comes to be viewed as the domain of ‘insider’ liars, there is a seductive authenticity, even a strange kind of honesty, about the ‘common knowledge’ liar. The rise of highly polished, professional politicians such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton exacerbated the sense that politics is all about strategic concealment of the truth, something that the Iraq War seemed to confirm as much as anything. Trump or Farage may have a reputation for fabricating things, but they don’t (rightly or wrongly) have a reputation for concealing things, which grants them a form of credibility not available to technocrats or professional politicians.
At the same time, and even more corrosively, when elected representatives come to be viewed as ‘insider liars’, it turns out that other professions whose job it is to report the truth – journalists, experts, officials – also suffer a slump in trust. Indeed, the distinctions between all these fact-peddlers start to look irrelevant in the eyes of those who’ve given up on the establishment altogether. It is this type of all-encompassing disbelief that creates the opportunity for right-wing populism in particular. Trump voters are more than twice as likely to distrust the media as those who voted for Clinton in 2016, according to the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, which adds that the four countries currently suffering the most ‘extreme trust losses’ are Italy, Brazil, South Africa and the US.
It’s one thing to measure public attitudes, but quite another to understand what shapes them. Alienation and disillusionment develop slowly, and without any single provocation. No doubt economic stagnation and soaring inequality have played a role – but we should not discount the growing significance of scandals that appear to discredit the honesty and objectivity of ‘liberal elites’. The misbehaviour of elites did not ‘cause’ Brexit, but it is striking, in hindsight, how little attention was paid to the accumulation of scandal and its consequences for trust in the establishment.
Britain’s decade of scandal
The 2010 edition of the annual British Social Attitudes survey included an ominous finding. Trust in politicians, already low, had suffered a fresh slump, with a majority of people saying politicians never tell the truth. But at the same time, interest in politics had mysteriously risen. To whom would this newly engaged section of the electorate turn if they had lost trust in ‘politicians’? One answer was clearly UKIP, who experienced their greatest electoral gains in the years that followed, to the point of winning the most seats in the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. UKIP’s surge, which initially appeared to threaten the Conservative Party, was integral to David Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum on EU membership. One of the decisive (and unexpected) factors in the referendum result was the number of voters who went to the polls for the first time, specifically to vote Leave.
What might have prompted the combination of angry disillusionment and intensifying interest that was visible in the 2010 survey? It predated the toughest years of austerity, but there was clearly one event that did more than any other to weaken trust in politicians: the MPs’ expenses scandal, which blew up in May 2009 thanks to a drip-feed of revelations published by the Daily Telegraph. Following as it did so soon after a disaster of world-historic proportions – the financial crisis – the full significance of the expenses scandal may have been forgotten. But its ramifications were vast. For one thing, it engulfed many of the highest reaches of power in Westminster: the Speaker of the House of Commons, the home secretary, the secretary of state for communities and local government and the chief secretary to the Treasury all resigned. Not only that, but the rot appeared to have infected all parties equally, validating the feeling that politicians had more in common with each other (regardless of party loyalties) than they did with decent, ordinary people.
Many of the issues that ‘elites’ deal with are complex, concerning law, regulation and economic analysis. We can all see the fallout of the financial crisis, for instance, but the precise causes are disputed and hard to fathom. By contrast, everybody understands expense claims, and everybody knows lying and exaggerating are among the most basic moral failings; even a child understands they are wrong. This may be unfair to the hundreds of honest MPs and to the dozens whose misdemeanours fell into a murky area around the ‘spirit’ of the rules. But the sense of a mass stitch-up was deeply – and understandably – entrenched.
The other significant thing about the expenses scandal was the way it set a template for a decade of elite scandals – most of which also involved lies, leaks and dishonest denials. One year later, there was another leak from a vast archive of government data: in 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of US military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. With the assistance of newspapers including the New York Times, Der Spiegel, the Guardian and Le Monde, these ‘war logs’ disclosed horrifying details about the conduct of US forces and revealed the Pentagon had falsely denied knowledge of various abuses. While some politicians expressed moral revulsion at what had been exposed, the US and British governments blamed Wiki-Leaks for endangering their troops, and the leaker, Chelsea Manning, was jailed for espionage.
In 2011, the phone-hacking scandal put the press itself under the spotlight. It was revealed that senior figures in News International and the Metropolitan Police had long been aware of the extent of phone-hacking practices – and they had lied about how much they knew. Among those implicated was the prime minister’s communications director, former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who was forced to resign his post and later jailed. By the end of 2011, the News of the World had been closed down, the Leveson inquiry was underway, and the entire Murdoch empire was shaking.
The biggest scandal of 2012 was a different beast altogether, involving unknown men manipulating a number that very few people had even heard of. The number in question, the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, is meant to represent the rate at which banks are willing to loan to each other. What was surreal, in an age of complex derivatives and high-frequency trading algorithms, was that this number was calculated on the basis of estimates declared by each bank on a daily basis, and accepted purely on trust. The revelation that a handful of brokers had conspired to alter Libor for private gain (with possible costs to around 250,000 UK mortgage-holders, among others) may have been difficult to fully comprehend, but it gave the not unreasonable impression of an industry enriching itself in a criminal fashion at the public’s expense. Bob Diamond, the CEO of Barclays, the bank at the centre of the conspiracy, resigned in July 2012.
Towards the end of that year, the media was caught in another prolonged crisis, this time at the BBC. Horror greeted the broadcast of the ITV documentary The Other Side of Jimmy Savile in October 2012. How many people had known about his predatory sexual behaviour, and for how long? Why had the police abandoned earlier investigations? And why had the BBC’s Newsnight dropped its own film about Savile, due to be broadcast shortly after his death in 2011? The police swiftly established Operation Yewtree to investigate historic sexual abuse allegations, while the BBC established independent commissions into what had gone wrong. But a sense lingered that neither the BBC nor the police had really wanted to know the truth of these matters for the previous forty years.
It wasn’t long before it was the turn of the corporate world. In September 2014, a whistleblower revealed that Tesco had exaggerated its half-yearly profits by £250 million, increasing the figure by around a third. An accounting fiddle on this scale clearly had roots at a senior managerial level. Sure enough, four senior executives were suspended the same month and three were charged with fraud two years later. A year later, it emerged that Volkswagen had systematically and deliberately tinkered with emissions controls in their vehicles, so as to dupe regulators in tests, but then pollute liberally the rest of the time. The CEO, Martin Winterkorn, resigned.
‘We didn’t really learn anything from WikiLeaks we didn’t already presume to be true’, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed in 2014. ‘But it is one thing to know it in general and another to get concrete data.’11 The nature of all these scandals suggests the emergence of a new form of ‘facts’, in the shape of a leaked archive – one that, crucially, does not depend on trusting the second-hand report of a journalist or official. These revelations are powerful and consequential precisely because they appear to directly confirm our fears and suspicions. Resentment towards ‘liberal elites’ would no doubt brew even in the absence of supporting evidence. But when that evidence arises, things become far angrier, even when the data – as in the case of Hillary Clinton’s emails – isn’t actually very shocking.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the scandals of the past decade, nor are they all of equal significance. But viewing them together provides a better sense of how the suspicions of populists cut through. Whether or not we continue to trust in politicians, journalists or officials, we have grown increasingly used to this pattern in which a curtain is dramatically pulled back, to reveal those who have been lying to or defrauding the public. Another pattern also begins to emerge. It’s not just that isolated individuals are unmasked as corrupt or self-interested (something that is as old as politics), but that the establishment itself starts to appear deceitful and dubious. The distinctive scandals of the twenty-first century are a combination of some very basic and timeless moral failings (greed and dishonesty) with technologies of exposure that expose malpractice on an unprecedented scale, and with far more dramatic results.
Perhaps the most important feature of all these revelations was that they were definitely scandals, and not merely failures: they involved deliberate efforts to defraud or mislead. Several involved sustained cover-ups, delaying the moment of truth for as long as possible. Several ended with high-profile figures behind bars. Jail terms satisfy some of the public demand that the ‘elites’ pay for their dishonesty, but they don’t repair the trust that has been damaged. On the contrary, there’s a risk that they affirm the cry for retribution, after which the quest for punishment is only ramped up further. Chants of ‘lock her up’ reverberated around Trump rallies, long after the 2016 election was over.
In addition to their conscious and deliberate nature, a second striking feature of these scandals was the ambiguous role played by the media. On the one hand, the reputation of the media has taken a pummelling over the past decade, egged on by populists and conspiracy theorists who accuse the ‘mainstream media’ of being allied to professional political leaders, and who now have the benefit of social media through which to spread this message. The moral authority of newspapers may never have been high, but the grisly revelations that journalists hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler represented a new low in the public standing of the press. The Leveson inquiry, followed soon after by the Savile revelations and Operation Yewtree, generated a sense of a media class who were adept at exposing others, but equally expert at concealing the truth of their own behaviours.
On the other hand, it was newspapers and broadcasters that enabled all of this to come to light at all. The extent of phone hacking was eventually exposed by the Guardian, the MPs’ expenses by the Telegraph, Jimmy Savile by ITV, and the ‘war logs’ reported with the aid of several newspapers around the world simultaneously. But the media was playing a different kind of role from the one traditionally played by journalists and newspapers, with very different implications for the status of truth in society. A backlog of data and allegations had built up in secret, until eventually a whistle was blown. An archive existed that the authorities refused to acknowledge, until they couldn’t resist the pressure to do so any longer. Journalists and whistleblowers were instrumental in removing the pressure valve, but from that point on, truth poured out unpredictably. While such torrents are underway, there is no way of knowing how far they may spread or how long they may last.
The era of ‘big data’ is also the era of ‘leaks’. Where traditional ‘sleaze’ could topple a minister, several of the defining scandals of the past decade have been on a scale so vast that they exceed any individual’s responsibility. The Edward Snowden revelations of 2013, the Panama Papers leak of 2015 and the HSBC files (revealing organised tax evasion) all involved the release of tens of thousands or even millions of documents. Paper-based bureaucracies never faced threats to their legitimacy on this scale.
The power of commissions and inquiries to make sense of so much data is not to be understated, nor is the integrity of those newspapers and whistleblowers that helped bring misdemeanours to light. In cases such as MPs’ expenses, some newspapers even invited their readers to help search these vast archives for treasure troves, like human algorithms sorting through data. But it is hard to imagine that the net effect of so many revelations was to build trust in any publicly visible institutions. On the contrary, the discovery that ‘elites’ have been blocking access to a mine of incriminating data is perfect fodder for conspiracy theories. In his 2010 memoir, A Journey, Tony Blair confessed that legislating for freedom of information was one of his biggest regrets, which gave a glimpse of how transparency is viewed from the centre of power.
Following the release of the war logs by WikiLeaks, nobody in any position of power claimed that the data wasn’t accurate (it was, after all, the data, and not a journalistic report). Nor did they offer any moral justification for what was revealed. Defence departments were left making the flimsiest of arguments – that it was better for everyone if they didn’t know how war was conducted. It may well be that the House of Commons was not fairly represented by the MPs’ expenses scandal, that most City brokers are honest, or that the VW emissions scam was a one-off within the car industry. But scandals don’t work through producing fair or representative pictures of the world; they do so by blowing the lid on hidden truths and lies. Where whistleblowing and leaking become the dominant form of truth-telling, the authority of professional truth-tellers – reporters, experts, professionals, broadcasters – is thrown into question.
Post-liberal elites
The term ‘illiberal democracy’ is now frequently invoked to describe states such as Hungary under Viktor Orbán or Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In contrast to liberal democracy, this model of authoritarian populism targets the independence of the judiciary and the media, ostensibly on behalf of ‘the people’. Brexit has been caused partly by distrust in ‘liberal elites’, but the anxiety is that it is also accelerating a drift towards ‘illiberalism’. There is a feeling at large, albeit among outspoken Remainers, that the BBC has treated the Leave campaign and Brexit itself with kid gloves, for fear of provoking animosity. More worrying was the discovery by openDemocracy in October that the Metropolitan Police were delaying their investigation into alleged breaches of electoral law by the Leave campaign due to what a Met spokesperson called ‘political sensitivities’.12 The risk at the present juncture is that key civic institutions will seek to avoid exercising scrutiny and due process, for fear of upsetting their opponents.
Britain is not an ‘illiberal democracy’, but the credibility of our elites is still in trouble, and efforts to placate their populist opponents may only make matters worse. At the more extreme end of the spectrum, the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, has used his celebrity and social media reach to cast doubt on the judiciary and the BBC at once. Yaxley-Lennon has positioned himself as a freedom fighter, revealing ‘the truth’ about Muslim men accused of grooming underage girls, by violating legal rules that restrict reporting details of ongoing trials. Yaxley-Lennon was found guilty of contempt of court and jailed (he was later released after the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial, and the case has been referred to the attorney general), but this only deepened his appeal for those who believed the establishment was complicit in a cover-up, and ordinary people were being deliberately duped.
The political concern right now is that suspicions of this nature – that the truth is being deliberately hidden by an alliance of ‘elites’ – are no longer the preserve of conspiracy theorists, but becoming increasingly common. Our current crisis has too many causes to enumerate here, and it is impossible to apportion blame for a collective collapse of trust – which is as much a symptom of changes in media technologies as it is of any moral failings on the part of elites. But what is emerging now is what Michel Foucault would have called a new ‘regime of truth’ – a different way of organising knowledge and trust in society. The advent of experts and government administrators in the seventeenth century created the platform for a distinctive liberal solution to this problem, which rested on the assumption that knowledge would reside in public records, newspapers, government files and journals. But once the integrity of these people and these instruments is cast into doubt, an opportunity arises for a new class of political figures and technologies to demand trust instead.
The project that was launched over three centuries ago, of trusting elite individuals to know, report and judge things on our behalf, may not be viable in the long term, at least not in its existing form. It is tempting to indulge the fantasy that we can reverse the forces that have undermined it, or else batter them into retreat with an even bigger arsenal of facts. But this is to ignore the more fundamental ways in which the nature of trust is changing.
The main feature of the emerging regime is that truth is now assumed to reside in hidden archives of data, rather than in publicly available facts. This is what is affirmed by scandals such as MPs’ expenses and the leak of the Iraq War logs – and more recently in the #MeToo movement, which also occurred through a sudden and voluminous series of revelations, generating a crisis of trust. The truth was out there, just not in the public domain. In the age of email, social media and camera phones, it is now common sense to assume that virtually all social activity is generating raw data, which exists out there somewhere. Truth becomes like the lava below the earth’s crust, which periodically bursts through as a volcano.
What role does this leave for the traditional, analogue purveyors of facts and figures? What does it mean to ‘report’ the news in an age of reflexive disbelief? Newspapers have been grappling with this question for some time now; some have decided to refashion themselves as portals to the raw data, or curators of other people’s content. But it is no longer intuitively obvious to the public why they should be prepared to take a journalist’s word for something, when they can witness the thing itself in digital form. There may be good answers to these questions, but they are not obvious ones.
Instead, a new type of heroic truth-teller has emerged in tandem with these trends. This is the individual who appears brave enough to call bullshit on the rest of the establishment – whether that be government agencies, newspapers, business, political parties or anything else. Some are whistleblowers, others are political leaders, and others are more like conspiracy theorists or trolls. The problem is that everyone has a different heroic truth-teller, because we’re all preoccupied by different bullshit. There is no political alignment between figures such as Chelsea Manning and Nigel Farage; what they share is only a willingness to defy the establishment and break consensus.
If a world where everyone has their own truth-tellers sounds dangerously like relativism, that’s because it is. But the roots of this new and often unsettling ‘regime of truth’ don’t only lie with the rise of populism or the age of big data. Elites have largely failed to understand that this crisis is about trust rather than facts – which may be why they did not detect the rapid erosion of their own credibility.
Unless liberal institutions and their defenders are willing to reckon with their own inability to sustain trust, the events of the past decade will remain opaque to them. And unless those institutions can rediscover aspects of the original liberal impulse – to keep different domains of power separate, and put the disinterested pursuit of knowledge before the pursuit of profit – then the present trends will only intensify, and no quantity of facts will be sufficient to resist. Power and authority will accrue to a combination of decreasingly liberal states and digital platforms – interrupted only by the occasional outcry as whistles are blown and outrages exposed.
Comedy or Demagoguery?
Back in the early 1990s, when Rob Newman and David Baddiel were selling out vast arenas, it was briefly posited that ‘comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll’. Today one might surmise that ‘politics is the new comedy’. In addition to the reality television star in the White House, the party with the largest vote share in Italy’s 2018 elections – Five Star – was founded by a former comedian, and the president of Ukraine is a former comedian. The funny side of Boris Johnson has been fading for some time. But it is still clear that the man currently favourite to be Britain’s next prime minister has milked his comedy value effectively over the past twenty years, with Have I Got News for You playing a particularly important role in raising the national profile of the blustering blond buffoon.
There is nothing funny about the political consequences of men such as Donald Trump and Johnson, but it is hard to deny that they generate plenty of the kind of ‘content’ that entertains their opponents on the liberal left. Shows such as Have I Got News For You, or The Daily Show in the United States, have no doubt provided a crucial pressure valve for those on the liberal left seeking to cope with political events that seem beyond reason. But they also risk creating an unspoken partnership between reckless conservative politicians and their critics, with the latter using mockery and laughter to distance themselves from the seriousness of the situation, while raising the profile of such politicians further.
Twitter is an especially fraught medium in this regard, where the dominant mood is a mixture of irony and outrage that finds frequent expression in humorous ridicule of opposing political arguments. Even before the trolls and meme-makers have got to work, one sure-fire way to go viral around social media is to make a public blunder of some kind. Who’s to say that these are necessarily ‘mistakes’? The clown has an immediate advantage in the attention economy. As Richard Seymour has argued, ‘Through our incensed critique, we enter into a new kind of affective symbiosis with the shit-stirrers.’13
Politics and comedy are dissolving into one another in disturbing ways. But perhaps we can go even further: in key respects, the public sphere has been reconfigured over the past twenty years around the template of the stand-up comedy club. The precedent for our turbulent, unruly, hilarious, dangerous political moment lies in those late-night sessions, above pubs and underground, where an individual seeks to tame and tickle a crowd, occasionally getting diverted into dealing with a heckler. The root cause of this fusion of comedy with politics is the digitisation of our public sphere, with all the innovations and expansions that have gone with it.
In its idealised liberal form, the ‘public sphere’ granted an unrivalled power to the technology of the printing press and the judgement of the critic. Books, magazines, journals and newspapers were the original conduits of national and international public argument, with respect to knowledge, culture and politics. Print publications allowed scholars to criticise and learn from one another. They allowed artistic pioneers to acquire reputation. Despite the model of the European salon or coffee shop celebrated by Jürgen Habermas and Richard Sennett, it was print technology that allowed arguments to be conducted over time and space.
The possibility of a reasoned, thoughtful critique of a novel, political speech, artwork or policy depended originally on the specific affordances of the press. Daily newspapers allowed vast publics to inhabit a shared chronology (facilitating the ‘imagined community’ that Benedict Anderson saw as the central artefact of nations), but one which operated according to a particular metronomic punctuality.14 Debates could continue via the letters pages of newspapers or – more slowly – the pages of scholarly journals for months or years. The recent valorisation of live debate, in the hands of celebrities such as Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, is more a symptom of a given business model, where audiences (and potential book buyers) are attracted to the frisson of staged intellectual combat, than it is a testimony to ‘reason’ or ‘enlightenment’.
Critique necessarily involves delay. Even where an artwork involves performance, such as a concert or piece of theatre, and where its effect is visceral and dramatic, a critic still requires some time to convert their experience into thoughts, reflections and judgement. It’s perfectly possible for a critic to be greatly affected by something in the moment – for instance a political speech or film – while concluding, on reflection, that it was bad. Politicians who deploy emotional techniques too readily are accused of demagoguery, while art that panders to nostalgia or romantic cliché is accused of being schmaltzy or sentimental.
In this analogue context, stand-up comedy was always a bit of an anomaly. What, after all, is the point of critique when it comes to live comedy? If an audience is doubled up in laughter, in what sense could the critic declare the comedy unworthy? If a comedian is dying on their feet, how could they possibly be judged to be any good? Unlike virtually any other cultural form, stand-up comedy is real-time, or it is nothing at all. Stand-up comedy comes with its own inbuilt form of critical feedback, namely laughter.
Except laughter is not really critical feedback at all. For one thing, it operates via the body as much as the mind, gripping our chests, evading conscious control. For another, it emanates from the crowd as much as from the individual, with all of the unpredictable patterns that go with crowd behaviour. But what most distinguishes laughter from a judgement is that judgements can be ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, pinpointing merits and weaknesses. A book review can lavish praise or deliver a hatchet-job. A comedy audience, on the other hand, can either laugh … or not. The quality of a stand-up comedian is reflected in how much positive feedback they get. A bad comedian doesn’t receive bad feedback; they receive no feedback.
There is, of course, an exception to this which arises when hecklers intervene. And yet the heckle is not a criticism, so much as an attention-grabbing disruption. It throws down a challenge to the comedian to react and seize control of the situation. If they succeed in doing so, they can appear brave and smart in their ability to think quickly. The unrehearsed nature of the heckle and put-down grants them an air of authenticity and excitement, that the scripted performance cannot attain on its own. The triumphant comedian takes on heroic qualities in the eyes of their audience, being not just brave enough to do stand-up at all, but seemingly possessed of a real-time wit that is displayed like a master swordsman. There is a suspension of disbelief at work, where the audience members convince themselves that the hero is really like this, that they are not witnessing the carefully honed fruits of thousands of gigs (it is a motto within Britain’s stand-up community that you don’t really know what you’re doing on stage until you’ve done 500 gigs), but a genuinely brilliant person seizing control of a crowd. The persona and the person are one and the same.
There is, nevertheless, one set of observers whose critical judgement is hugely valued by stand-up comedians, namely other stand-up comedians. While the newspaper critic can be dismissed as a loser and a curmudgeon, who lacks the guts to ever stand on a stage and refuses to acknowledge the ultimate importance of audience reaction, the rival stand-up understands the craft and courage of doing comedy. Comedians seek the approval of other comedians more than anyone else, for only their peers (and especially their more established peers) truly grasp the artistry of the stand-up performance. An audience can provide a constant flow of affirmative laughter, but only the rival can offer that most valued commodity: recognition.
This template for public performance, reaction, disruption and recognition is now being recreated in various situations, not least in and around the institutions of democracy. This might go some way to explaining why professional and quasi-comedians now seem to possess some kind of advantage in the new political landscape.
First of all, the explosion of media bandwidth over the past twenty years, which has normalised the twenty-four-hour news cycle, has meant that the public sphere is less dominated by critics than by real-time reaction. Evidently, some people have more influence over the reaction than others: just as there are professional ‘influencers’, there are now professional ‘reactors’ such as Piers Morgan and Toby Young, whose main role in public life is to divert attention in certain directions, and encourage audience response. Twitter provides a constant, rolling, twenty-four-seven version of the comedy club audience, laughing back at the figures on the stage, periodically hurling chunks of abuse from the anonymity of the unlit auditorium. None of this is criticism as such, and most of it would be meaningless if it was delayed, even by just a few hours. Like laughter, it is real-time feedback, that all counts as attention of one kind or another.
Technologies are developing all the time to facilitate greater ease of feedback, along with the capacity to quantify and analyse it. The Facebook ‘reaction’ buttons (like, angry, wow, laughter, sad) are one example, while Twitter ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ are another. Facial analytics and other behavioural monitoring tools expand the capacity to harvest real-time sentiment from audiences. As far as the digital platforms are concerned, the objective here is really no different from that of a comedy club manager: to ensure that as many people are bringing their reactions to this location, and not to a rival one. What a ‘like’ or ‘favourite’ means, or why it was given, is beside the point. Like the laughter that ripples through a comedy club, it was how things felt at the time.
Like the audience in the club, the online crowd is amenable to waves of feeling, which seize its members in ways that they don’t expect and can’t always easily explain. As Seymour argues, this can only really be understood as a ‘somatic’ phenomenon, that is, a process that passes from one physical body to another, only now mediated by touchscreens, wireless networks and algorithms, creating long-distance, real-time crowds. Unlike publishers, the platforms are not looking for positive judgement of the content they host, but intensity of sentiment, regardless of whether it is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ (Facebook, presumably, sees ‘angry’ or ‘sad’ reactions as of equal value to ‘like’). With YouTube, Facebook and Twitter coming under increasing fire for their hosting of hateful and violent content, it needs to be remembered that – as for the comedy club – the only bad content, from the perspective of their business model, is that which provokes no engagement or feedback at all.
One of the challenges presented to politicians by the twenty-four-hour, real-time public sphere is that they can be ‘heckled’ at any time. They’re never entirely off-stage. The phenomenon of MPs being harassed in the street is an ugly and troubling political development, but it is partly an effect of ubiquitous smartphones and YouTube. Invariably, the harasser (or their accomplice) is filming the event, in the hope of gaining some online respect. Court hearings now face similar threats from political movements, such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s (‘Tommy Robinson’), aimed at politicising them. The same is true of most disruptions of campus events.
Politicians who can navigate real-time disturbances, on camera, while maintaining their composure can reap huge political dividends. Never has Jeremy Corbyn outshone Theresa May as much as he did in the summer of 2017, following footage of the two leaders visiting Grenfell Tower survivors. Corbyn appeared relaxed and physically intimate with people, while May looked uncomfortable and formal. Like the stand-up going off script, the heroism of leaders in this climate is demonstrated when protocol is abandoned, and everything comes down to live performance. It is a sign of how badly May is suited to the present media climate that she allegedly speaks from a script even during private meetings.
Trump’s 2016 rallies took the cult of live performance to ridiculous lengths. Frequently compared to the atmosphere at WWE wrestling bouts, these events were a manic combination of the scripted, the unscripted and the scripted ‘unscripted’, complete with hecklers being dragged out by security, and Trump taking every opportunity to be as Trump as possible. As with live comedy, so for wrestling and Trump rallies: the critic is blindsided by an event where everything is in the delivery, and the lasting contribution is neither here nor there.
It’s not news that ‘authenticity’ is a highly prized attribute in this era of anti-politics. But as with the authenticity of the stand-up comedian, this is a complicated asset that usually takes considerable practice to develop. Just as the greatest achievement of a stand-up is to convince the audience that the whole thing is spontaneous – that they’re really getting to hang out with a brilliant wit – a figure such as Boris Johnson has had plenty of opportunity to tinker with the character known as ‘Boris’. As any stand-up will tell you, the trick is to find the part or version of yourself that you’re most confident and comfortable sharing, which can take time to identify. It’s neither ‘fake’ nor ‘real’, but something else altogether.
And as with stand-up comedy, the figure that the demagogic leader most reveres – and whose approval he most seeks – is the other demagogic leader. Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro and, in a milder sense, Johnson, are each examples of a type of populist ‘strong man’, who holds the liberal media in disdain and seeks to position himself above oppositional parliamentary politics. But each of them has a weakness when it comes to the others, revelling in the mutual flattery that can only be offered by a national leader of a similar psychology.
The danger this whole situation poses is that we constantly encounter serious issues packaged up with unserious ones. The mood of Brexit is one of gloomy hilarity, generating a media cycle of absurdity, outrage, ridicule and fear, but which never quite seems to descend on anything real or permanent. One reason for this affective state is that, where Brexit is concerned, there really isn’t much time, making critical distance and delay harder to come by. It is a situation ripe for demagoguery, where a skilled and ‘authentic’ personality can face down opponents live, on camera. A further risk is that harmful policies only become publicly denounced once they’ve become outrageous, and even then the denunciators are often vying for attention.
It’s been reported that 54 per cent of British voters believe that the UK now needs a ‘strong leader willing to break the rules’.15 What might such a figure look like? Images of ‘strong men’ rulers are usually of military types, with scant regard for the rule of law. But it’s just as likely (perhaps more so) that such a figure could arise in Britain in the guise of a heroic wit, who successfully puts dissenting ‘hecklers’ in their place with great panache. Those who have honed such personas over years will be well placed to seize this political moment. Avoiding this will require the rest of us, where possible, to resist getting seduced by humour, rhetorical reflexes and bravado. We need to find an alternative to the kind of ‘heckling’ reaction that dominates the twenty-four-seven news cycle, especially on social media, which the performer ultimately benefits from. In place of staged combat, we need to find the time and the space to carry out critical analysis. A bit of humourlessness might go a long way.