‘The People’ versus ‘Politics’
Had Britain departed the EU on 31 March 2019, as Theresa May had hoped, it wouldn’t have held European elections the following May. The results of those elections prompted many observers to question whether two-party politics (and the Conservative Party in particular) were finished. Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party came top with 32 per cent of the vote, and the Conservatives fifth with just 9 per cent; May resigned the following day. Spring 2019 confirmed something that was lurking within Brexit all along: that it was never simply a policy choice or regulatory problem to solve, but an attack on the entire liberal apparatus of government, professional party politics and mainstream media. It wasn’t clear how any politician could satisfy a desire to explode politics. The answer concocted by Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings over the summer of 2019 was to craft a whole new style of leadership – against the liberal media, against Parliament and even against the law. The comical, destructive, mendacious Facebook star known as ‘Boris’ was pitted against the establishment. By the time of the December 2019 election, the Johnson campaign was operating less as a normal political party, and more as a single-issue guerrilla marketing outfit.
Democracy without Representation
It is a necessary principle of representative democracy that small minorities – parties, politicians, parliaments – stand for the whole. The system works best when there is an element of illusion involved, such that the narrow range of characters and ideas on the public stage is viewed as a decent proxy for society at large. Too much scrutiny – when a dodgy expense claim comes to light, say, or an email indiscretion – and the illusion is liable to be dispelled.
But when the stage is set correctly, the illusion can be very powerful. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair oversaw devastating electoral machines, which delivered four huge parliamentary majorities in the space of twenty years. Both appeared to establish a new consensus as to what constituted good leadership and policy. The fact that neither leader ever won the votes of more than 31 per cent of the electorate was obscured, not only by Britain’s archaic voting system, but by a set of media institutions for which ‘national politics’ meant Westminster. What is taken to have been an epoch-defining national ‘ism’ can, on closer inspection, appear more like a canny handling of newspaper owners and party donors. But that’s the way the illusion works. It generates the mass psychological impression that we have all given our consent. Another term for this is ‘hegemony’.
The tradition of Marxist state theory has grappled with a related question: how do policies that serve a narrow set of economic interests come to be regarded as common sense, as if they benefited the economy as a whole? It’s not just that capitalist states defend the interests of capital, but that they tend to favour one type of capital at the expense of others. Until recently, the consensus on ‘good’ economic policy concealed a mentality that always in effect privileged finance. One economic part was treated as a proxy for the economic whole. If it is to retain credibility, this equivalence requires careful political and cultural management.
British democracy is currently disillusioned. The parties that dominated the past century of national politics are in crisis; an astonishing YouGov poll conducted in May 2019 put both Labour and the Conservatives on 19 per cent, behind the Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. An Opinium poll later put the Brexit Party out in front on 26 per cent. Farage’s outfit has adopted the model of a platform start-up, as pioneered by the Italian Five Star Movement, to disrupt electoral politics at unprecedented speed. Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn now hold the record for the most unpopular leadership duo ever, breaking the record set by Thatcher and Michael Foot in December 1981.
The roots of this disillusionment extend back many years, well before the 2016 referendum. Nevertheless, a plebiscite does particular violence to the faith on which parliamentary democracy depends. It takes the complex patchwork of parties, constituencies and coalitions of interest, and in an instant subordinates the lot to a single popular demand. It’s doubtful that David Cameron ever thought this far ahead, but in his passion for referendums (four were held during his premiership) he was testing parliamentary sovereignty to breaking point. Under these circumstances, political hegemony is impossible. No leader, party or ideology can credibly be presented as serving the common good. There are only factions battling other factions. Meanwhile, the priorities of the national newspapers and broadcasters seem increasingly out of sync with those of the electorate, who can now turn to a plethora of online sources. Business lobbies have rarely been so powerless over the fundamentals of economic policy.
In principle, this sudden awakening of pluralism could be good news, a ‘British Spring’ that breaks through the screen onto which ‘politics’ has long been projected by political and media machines, to reveal how power actually works. That’s a hope worth hanging on to. The danger is that while faith in the overall system may have evaporated, its rusty constitutional mechanics are still in place.
Britain’s next prime minister will be elected by the 160,000 members of the Conservative Party. According to YouGov, 59 per cent of these members voted for the Brexit Party in the April 2019 European elections. The Tories have made numerous bad leadership appointments in the last twenty years (think of Iain Duncan Smith), but have corrected them once the pragmatic question of electoral success entered the equation. That pressure pushes the party towards the swing voter of the centre ground, the ‘Mondeo Man’ or ‘Worcester Woman’ fetishised by party pollsters in the 1990s and early 2000s. Is any of this still relevant? How much do Tory members even care about general elections, compared to their passion for a no-deal Brexit? There are plenty of reasons not to elect Boris Johnson as prime minister, but much of the Conservative electorate is focused only on his one perceived virtue: his celebration of no deal.
The Conservative leadership contest is already turning into a competition on who can make the most autocratic statement on Brexit. Esther McVey has said that, as prime minister, she would sack every Remainer from the cabinet. Candidates idly toss around the prospect of proroguing Parliament, so as to ensure Britain’s timely exit. This prospect is coming to perform the moral function that torture plays in American Republican primary debates: it’s something candidates are obliged to clarify their position on, being wary of looking soft. It was no surprise that, in the recent leadership hustings, both Dominic Raab and Andrea Leadsom took the bait, declaring themselves in favour of Parliament being suspended by the Queen. As an indication of what’s happening to the Tory party, the more disturbing sight was of Jeremy Hunt – ostensibly a pragmatist – refusing to rule it out. And so the party’s long descent into ideological madness reaches a new nadir, where a sitting foreign secretary toys with declaring a state of exception, purely to exorcise some imagined European demon.
Take Nigel Farage. His achievement in winning the European elections with a four-month-old party is remarkable. But in comparison with the hapless Change UK, established a month later and now surely about to fold, his job was straightforward. The Brexit Party’s branding and social media tactics were state of the art, but the messaging wrote itself: when Britain failed to leave the EU on 29 March it was because Westminster politicians had betrayed the 52 per cent who had voted Leave. What’s more, where speedy selection of nationwide candidates is a task fraught with risk for a liberal start-up such as Change UK (two of its candidates had to be replaced after ‘inappropriate’ and ‘offensive’ tweets came to light), the Brexit Party draws energy and gains attention from its collection of cranks and firebrands.
The Brexit Party is a mixture of business start-up and social movement; it serves as a pressure valve, releasing pent-up frustration with traditional politics into the electoral system. Farage is in full control of the valve. He now possesses exceptional autonomy, quite free of the constraints that the media, party machines and constitutions have imposed on ambitious leaders in the past. Rival parties can neither ignore nor negotiate with this new presence. It makes the political weather.
No deal will always be a niche minority position, within the electorate and even more so in Parliament. And yet this is currently where all the momentum in British politics lies. This is a freakish and frightening situation. It isn’t just that no deal is unrepresentative of mainstream public opinion (by which one might mean the preferences of the risk-averse swing voter of yesterday), but that the forces behind it make no real claim to be representative either. No dealers are the most disillusioned of all: many believe they have seen through the con of parliamentary democracy and perceive themselves as freedom fighters against a mendacious and oppressive majority. This is an anti-hegemonic project. Little wonder that the Brexit Party fielded two former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party – Claire Fox and James Heartfield – among its MEP candidates. Support for no deal correlates directly with age, to the point where the majority of over-sixties now express support for Farage. It is also most entrenched among the financially secure. The typical no dealer is a hybrid of Che Guevara and a Telegraph-reading retiree from Sevenoaks.
Where does this momentum come from? The bitter irony is that it is partly the consequence of the legalistic nature of the EU itself. In such a dysfunctional political situation as the UK’s, no deal has the immense advantage of being the default outcome if nothing else can be agreed on. The most authoritarian force in British politics just now is Article 50 itself, with its two-year (since extended by seven months) window of opportunity to draft and ratify a withdrawal agreement. As it turns out, two years is more than enough time to initiate a national existential crisis, but not nearly enough time to sort one out. The flowering of any ‘British Spring’ will be cruelly curtailed before very long.
For both Thatcher and Blair, converting 30 per cent of the nation’s support into a transformative governing paradigm took considerable time, effort and political nous. In order to create a new common sense, ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘Blairism’ had to build up delicate alliances with key business interests, dominant media players, intellectuals and centres of expertise, all the while keeping in mind the median voter, with his or her everyday middle-class concerns about economic security. By contrast, come November this year, Farage, Johnson and their allies may well have achieved a far greater disruption of the political and economic status quo than Thatcher or Blair ever managed, with a smaller popular mandate and far less effort. They don’t need think-tanks, policy breakfasts, the CBI or party discipline. They don’t even need ideas. All they have to do, in pursuit of their goal, is to carry on being themselves, undermining trust, contaminating the grounds of agreement.
Given that any ‘soft Brexit’ is now seen as ‘betrayal’ by the Brexit Party and its sympathisers in the Conservative Party, it’s impossible to imagine any consensual compromise. Say what you like about Theresa May’s deal, but it was at least a viable route out of the European Union – just not an authentic one, as far as Farage et al. are concerned. No one appears to relish the prospect of a second referendum, though Farage would certainly build yet more political capital out of it if there were one. But what’s the alternative? While it might sound implausible, given the current depth of anti-government feeling, the most reasonable solution would be to revoke Article 50 and call a general election, with the parties – four or five mid-sized ones, as things stand – all laying out their visions for Britain’s relationship with Europe in their manifestos.
The question for the longer term is the one that has been repeatedly asked since Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015: is this type of politics a blip, or is this the new normal? Can we become re-illusioned with representative democracy? Or is all politics now a form of anti-politics? The circumstances of Brexit are unique, as is the sense of emergency cultivated by the time limit imposed by Article 50. It is possible that the most recent elections and polls exaggerate the influence that Brexit will play over future voting behaviour. But there are good reasons to believe that we are witnessing a new type of democracy.
Chief among these reasons is the rise of what the sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo has called the ‘digital party’ or ‘platform party’, of which Farage’s Brexit Party is arguably the most impressive example to date.1 According to Gerbaudo, such a party ‘is to the current informational era of ubiquitous networks, social media and smartphone apps what the mass party was to the industrial era or the cynically professionalised “television party” was during the post–Cold War era of high neoliberalism’.2 It is like a tech start-up, aimed at rapid growth, with email sign-ups and PayPal donations replacing formal membership. And, in accordance with the creed of Silicon Valley, its purpose is to disrupt.
Digital logic is also transforming the broader public sphere in which parties operate. Print and broadcast media have always depended on editorial judgement regarding what ‘the public’ is or should be interested in. To prosper in such a media system, politicians need to be ordinary and inoffensive to the mainstream. The ‘cynically professionalised’ politics to which Gerbaudo refers include carefully staged displays of normality by figures such as Blair and Bill Clinton. The bland sight of the 2010 Cameron-Clegg identikit double act was perhaps the UK’s final sighting of this type of leadership.
By contrast, in an age of limitless bandwidth and ubiquitous data capture, the challenge for politicians (or anyone else) is to get noticed and exert influence. This calls for a very different set of political and personal talents: confrontation, wit, defiance, spontaneity and rule-breaking. The politician who wants to target the swing voter via television tries to seem as normal as possible. The politician who seeks to mobilise support online will do precisely the opposite. While it’s true that Farage has made mileage out of his ‘ordinary’ cultural habits (‘a fag and a pint’), a Trumpian refusal to play by the rules is his more potent quality.
The internet is an anti-hegemonic technology. It grants far more power to the consensus-breaker than to the consensus-maker. As the data analytics industry understands, it is a brilliant machine for mapping unusual clusters of feeling and behaviour, but far less suited to establishing averages and generalities. The internet fragments the ‘middle ground’ as a space of political argument, and grants a disproportionately loud voice to the niche and the crank. There are illusions galore here, but no sanctuary for the crucial synecdochical one on which representative democracy depends. Notions of ‘common sense’ and ‘the average voter’ lose their sway.
These trends may be good for the vitality of democracy in various ways, but not necessarily for parliamentary democracy, and less still for effective government in the traditional sense. It could be that the UK faces a long future of minority governments and coalitions, in which every party is defined as a vessel for the particular discontents of its supporters. This would be bad news for Britain’s ‘natural party of government’, the Conservatives. It also poses a new challenge for capital, which has to try to present its interests as coinciding with those of the public. No doubt a solid majority of people out there are supportive of the basic foundations of parliamentary democracy, fervently opposed to no deal and appalled by the demagogic posturing of Johnson and Farage. The question is whether they can find a vehicle to represent their position, and find it fast.
The Conservative Selectorate
It seems there is only one voter who matters in British politics right now: a Brexit-obsessed, fifty-something white man living in rural southern England. Why? Because a quirk of Britain’s unwritten constitution is that prime ministers are often appointed by their parties without facing general election. John Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May were all selected by their party to take charge as a result of their predecessor resigning. Only Major was ever able to achieve any clear electoral success of his own.
May’s resignation in May meant that, once again, a new prime minister will soon be appointed without a democratic mandate. The overwhelming favourite is Boris Johnson, the controversial journalist-turned-politician, with a lifelong weakness for causing offence and then laughing off the consequences. Unless there is a great upset, Johnson’s appointment will be announced on 23 July, leaving this notoriously reckless figure to navigate Britain’s exit from the European Union, which he has committed to delivering by the 31 October deadline.
Each political party has its own way of handling the process. Brown insisted that he be handed the job by Tony Blair uncontested, which is what happened in 2007. (This was described as a ‘gigantic fraud’ at the time by none other than Johnson.) For the Conservatives, there is a complicated series of votes among the party’s members of Parliament to whittle things down to two candidates, who are then presented to the party’s members. The choice before the Conservative membership is between Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, a more trusted but unexciting man, with far less appeal to the Conservative base.
At a time of deep political and economic anxiety, the contest is producing the surreal experience of something that feels like democracy – an election campaign season, complete with televised debates and policy announcements – but without any public franchise. In this case, the ‘electorate’ consists of a mere 160,000 people, just 0.3 per cent of the national electorate, who are significantly older and richer than average.3 And while Johnson is hounded by questions surrounding his honesty and indiscretions, the Conservative Party membership seems to view his personality as an asset.
This is uncharted territory. Conservative Party rules have changed since Major entered office in 1990, to allow the members to have the final say. (May’s rivals all withdrew in 2016, so the members weren’t consulted.) At first glance, a leader elected by 160,000 people might seem to have a greater democratic mandate than one appointed by their own colleagues. But as more becomes known about the unusual identities and priorities of the party members, the worry is that Britain is now in the grip of something combining the worst aspects of both oligarchy and representative democracy. It might best be described as unrepresentative democracy.
Johnson’s appeal to his base rests heavily on his enthusiastic comments about a ‘no-deal’ Brexit, a kamikaze policy that would devastate Britain’s economy and produce a state of emergency for basic civil infrastructure, such as the supply of medicines. It would, however, signal a complete rejection of the authority of Brussels, which is why Johnson toys with it. The fact that a clear majority of the public opposes the idea is, for now, irrelevant. More disturbingly, new polling suggests that Conservative Party members are now so fixated on Brexit that they believe it is worth doing at almost any cost – even if it leads to Northern Ireland or Scotland leaving the United Kingdom, ‘significant damage to the UK economy’ or, most strikingly, the destruction of the Conservative Party.4 For the next few weeks, the most influential force in British politics is a fanatical sect.
How did Britain reach this extraordinary situation? A plausible part of the explanation is that the Conservative Party has been heavily infiltrated by supporters of Nigel Farage, whose new Brexit Party took more than a third of the vote in May’s European Parliament elections, energised by the fact that Britain did not leave the European Union on the scheduled date of 29 March.
Last August, Arron Banks, a major UKIP funder over the years and backer of the xenophobic Leave.EU campaign, wrote an op-ed for The Times titled ‘Join Tories and unseat the traitor Theresa’. It’s hard to know for certain how many people have followed Banks’s advice, but Faragism has clearly penetrated the Conservative Party. What’s more, the majority of Johnson’s supporters in the membership joined the party after the 2016 referendum. The party also appears to have experienced a surge in membership of around 30 per cent since last summer, when confidence in May’s Brexit deal started to plummet.
Pockets of deep resentment towards governing ‘elites’ are a feature of most liberal democracies today, to which there are a range of possible responses. What’s different in Britain is the collision between its old-fashioned, unwritten constitution and the exceptional drama of Brexit, which has become a Trojan Horse through which nationalist, anti-establishment rage is being channelled directly into the corridors of power. For years, the case for reforming Britain’s constitution, to ensure that parties and Parliament are more representative of the public, has been viewed as a somewhat academic topic, never urgent enough to demand much attention. Not any more. For the time being, Johnson has said enough to reassure the Conservative members that he will govern with the same xenophobic bravado that he has always expressed in his journalism. But if Johnson’s personality offers one glimmer of hope, it’s that he’s never shown any indication of holding principles, and is entirely relaxed about letting people down.
England’s New Rentier Alliance
It’s plausible that Boris Johnson could win a workable majority in an election, sometime in the next six months, and this is obviously something he would do if he possibly could. If he did, who and what would he represent? It’s easy to say ‘Leavers’ or ‘English nationalists’ and leave it at that. But I wonder if there is an economic formation at work too. There is a sub-set of the Leave vote that appears to have hardened over the past two years, becoming more fixated on ‘no deal’, and less willing to brook compromise. Surveys suggest that support for ‘no deal’ is clustered among older voters who report that they are financially secure.5 We also know from those notorious polls of Conservative Party members that they view Brexit as more important than economic prosperity and the Union. This group is scattered across rural England, and elected the current prime minister.
We can also look at the funders for the Leave campaign and Johnson’s leadership bid, who overlap heavily. These consist of maverick entrepreneurs (the bosses of JCB and Wetherspoons), private equity barons and hedge fund managers. This is decentralised, disruptive, disorganised, private capital, that looks at the likes of Johnson and Farage as kindred spirits in the project of injecting a bit of chaos into the liberal economic system. Regardless of how much agency we attribute to hedge funds (and there are various theories), it is clear that only the most fleet-footed, liquid, nimble type of capital can look at Brexit as an opportunity, while firms that rely heavily on fixed capital (such as car manufacturers) see it as a nightmare. This is capital that is never far from the exit.
I think we can therefore look at the new conservative coalition as an alliance of rentiers. The ‘no deal’ supporters are not classic rentiers, in the form of monopolists or exploiters of unproductive capital. However, they are at a point in life where they have paid off their mortgages, and are living off the assets held by pension funds. They are worth something, independently of what they do. This is the generation that enthusiastically backed Margaret Thatcher in their early working lives, witnessed Blairism and the booming of metropolitan multiculturalism with growing unease, and perhaps felt a rising resentment towards the international elite that was making the serious money in London, while convincing themselves (with the help of the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph) that London is now a foreign city (a fiction that Johnson cynically endorsed in his leadership campaign).6
What this group shares with the Johnson and Farage backers is a lack of any immediate interest in labour markets or productive capitalism. What’s the worst that could happen from the perspective of these interests? Inflation or a stock market slump would certainly harm them, but they may have forgotten that these things are even possible. Jeremy Corbyn terrifies them even more than Remain, as they believe he will tax capital, gifts and inheritance into oblivion. Where productivity gains are no longer sought, the goal becomes defending private wealth and keeping it in the family. This is a logic that unites the international oligarch and the comfortable Telegraph-reading retiree in Hampshire. The mentality is one of pulling up the draw-bridge, and cashing in your chips.
This suggests that Johnson-Farage is a symptom of prolonged financialisation, in which capital pulls increasingly towards unproductive investments, relying on balancesheet manipulation, negative interest rates and liquidity for its returns (aided substantially by quantitative easing over the past decade). To put that more starkly, these are seriously morbid symptoms, in which all productive opportunities have already been seized, no new ideas or technologies are likely, and there are no new spheres of social or environmental life left to exploit and commodify. These are socially nihilistic interests whose only concern with the future involves their children and grandchildren, but otherwise believe that everything good is in the past. The term ‘late capitalism’ has been over used, but this certainly feels like very late capitalism.
From this perspective, the present looks like the outcome of past investments. If you’re rich, it’s because you invested well thirty or forty years ago. You don’t owe anything to anyone, and have no obligation to invest anything more for the future. It’s your money, because of the time that elapsed while it was accumulating. The extreme manifestation of this nostalgic nihilism is Arron Banks, who is the decaying face of Harry Enfield’s Thatcherite ‘loadsamoney’ character, now living off the proceeds of his previous investments, while continuing to troll people about how little he cares about society. The financial troll uses his money to smash things up, as a type of conspicuous consumption: a way, as Thorstein Veblen argued, of showing how much money you can afford to waste, and how insulated you are from the consequences of your actions.7 For men such as Tim Martin, boss of Wetherspoons, backing ‘no deal’ is a way of signalling that you’re rich enough to take a haircut of a few million off your assets.
What of the remaining 70 per cent of the population, who are firmly opposed to an ultra-hard or ‘no-deal’ Brexit? It includes conventional business lobbies, who care about international supply chains, regulatory stability, skills and support for innovation. These are the interests that were exceptionally well served under New Labour and by the European Union. It also includes those who own nothing, and are vulnerable to week-by-week changes in their income and the cost of food. Finally, it includes most people under the age of fifty who still have hopes and expectations for the future, and relate to that future via the conventions of work, careers, debt and investment. Many of these people care deeply about climate change, far more than about Brexit.
Johnson, Farage and ‘no deal’ offer nothing to this majority whatsoever. That is a vulnerability, and there are reasons to suspect that the Liberal Democrats could pose just as much of a threat as Labour, if they become identified as the sole representatives of pro-business, Blairite modernity. There is also the not insignificant chunk of Conservative voters who support Remain and would rather Jeremy Hunt was prime minister right now. But until some of the political representatives of that 70 per cent construct some kind of coalition, and identify the language and overlapping policies that it shares (in spite of its deep heterogeneity), then the alliance of the nostalgic rentiers will succeed.
The Johnson Press
Over the course of Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign, Britain has been treated to a fresh media spectacle, marking a new low in the slow decline of an autonomous press. The Daily Telegraph, which has employed Boris Johnson off and on for over thirty years, and currently pays him £275,000 a year as a columnist, has put its full editorial and journalistic resource behind his bid to become leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore prime minister. Beside the constant trickle of op-eds praising his character and political judgement, the paper published an opinion poll on the morning of his leadership campaign launch, predicting he would win a majority of 140 in a general election, and has converted its front page into a type of campaign leaflet, full of flattering photos and slogans.
At best, this is distasteful and creepy. But is it dangerous? On its own, it is not substantially different from the way the newspapers fell behind Tony Blair in the late 1990s and early 2000s, or the Daily Mail briefly worked for Theresa May in 2016–17. But its broader context points to something more worrying than those precedents, with immediate echoes of what’s taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. The sound of journalists being booed at Johnson’s launch event should be enough to raise concerns of something Trumpian going on.
The rising intimacy between party machinery and the press (and hence, the declining public trust in both) is often blamed on New Labour, and Alastair Campbell particularly. Winning Rupert Murdoch’s support for Labour was viewed as a strategic triumph for Campbell and Blair, and an act of cynical deference by their critics. But it’s worth remembering that these doyens of ‘spin’ only placed so much emphasis on pleasing the press because they’d been so bruised by Murdoch et al. in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Spin, as we came to know it, was born under duress. New Labour might be accused of cynicism and superficiality in their fixation on headlines, but that fixation was a result of them deeming the press to be so dangerous. Blair, it is often forgotten, dedicated one of his last speeches to lambasting the ‘feral beasts’ of the media. The relationship between Downing Street and Fleet Street was, at best, one of détente (Blair’s growing personal camaraderie with Murdoch did nothing to help Gordon Brown).
The past decade has seen the Conservative Party develop a far closer relationship to the press that goes well beyond image management and spin. While Blair appointed a former journalist as his spin doctor, David Cameron put a former Times journalist (Michael Gove) and former Telegraph journalist (Johnson) in his cabinet, and a Times columnist and leader writer (Danny Finkelstein) in the House of Lords. Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, was also a Times columnist until 2013. The relationship between Cameronism and journalism worked both ways, as demonstrated when George Osborne was appointed editor of the Evening Standard despite no journalistic experience whatsoever. Johnson had to abandon his Telegraph column during his woeful tenure as foreign secretary, but continued to use the newspaper to outline his views on Brexit and other matters, who reported them gushingly as ‘exclusives’.
Johnson’s impending premiership has to be understood in this context, one in which journalists become politicians, and politicians become journalists. Rather than policies being developed and then ‘spun’ for media consumption, power becomes held by the storytellers themselves. But this is only one part of the story of how we reached the nadir of journalists being booed for failing to endorse a political candidate. The other part concerns technology.
By-passing journalism
As is now well understood, digital platforms have transformed the possibilities for political communication, by-passing traditional channels, and allowing political campaigns to target and address potential voters without the mediation of journalists, editors or broadcasting regulations. The democratic shocks of 2016 have been partly credited to Facebook’s power to connect campaigns (and carefully tailored campaign messages) directly with individuals, without any broader public awareness. This turns all campaigning into a form of ‘dog-whistling’, in which political messages circumvent the traditional, analogue public sphere.
One consequence of this is that the public (and even rival campaigns) don’t know what messages are being used or who they’re being aimed at. Targeted messaging appears to produce particular volatility where it is used to persuade non-voters to vote for the first time, as occurred with the EU referendum. But another consequence is that channels now exist through which to observe, criticise and dismiss journalists and the ‘mainstream media’. Trump famously uses Twitter to attack CNN, the New York Times and any other news agencies that report things he doesn’t like. Far-right activists and conspiracy theorists use YouTube and Facebook to accuse particular news channels of conspiring to cover up the truth. The claim that journalists are ‘enemies of the people’ can now be distributed as easily as news itself.
This has contributed to a situation in which press conferences and broadcast interviews are now inessential. Theresa May’s fateful 2017 election campaign intuited this, but acted on it half-heartedly, seeking to control her public engagements sufficiently to look paranoid and robotic, but not enough to avoid that impression leaking out to the electorate. Johnson’s campaign team is clearly going to make no such mistake, and it’s here that we enter Trumpian territory.
Johnson has famously given no broadcast interview over this campaign season, and has avoided live debates. Clearly, he has no real incentive to participate: he simply needs to outline a policy idea in the Telegraph, or make some implausibly bold statement in a newspaper interview, and it immediately gets repeated by broadcasters. The Sunday Times has become a willing accomplice to media-sceptic demagogues, running successive fawning interviews with Trump and Johnson, and producing front-page splashes (‘Trump: send in Farage and go for no-deal’; ‘Johnson: The £39bn is ours’) which might just as easily have been tweets from the men themselves. These too get reported by the BBC.
The Johnson launch event was a chilling spectacle for anyone who hopes he will be held to account by the press. Immediately announcing that he would take just six questions, he did at least manage to avoid the temptation to take all six from the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. But the performance was troubling nonetheless. The political editor of Sky News, Beth Rigby, attempted to ask a question about his ‘character’, which he immediately pretended to mis-hear as ‘parrot’, to much mirth. While Trump uses anger, and Johnson uses humour, the effect is the same: the journalistic space shifts from one of enquiry and testimony to one of performance and audience frisson. Humour is doing something very significant in our digital public sphere in helping political leaders to evade criticism.
Rigby persevered with her question about Johnson’s Islamophobic remarks which compared veiled Muslim women to ‘letterboxes’. It was here that his massed ranks of ERG supporters – high on the feeling of collective irresponsibility, like a Thatcher-themed stag-do in Riga – began to boo. Rigby had overstepped the mark by bringing unwelcome facts into the room. The booing was later defended by Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who tweeted at BBC editor, Laura Kuenssberg:
The ‘jeers’ at Boris’s launch were for Sky News’s Beth Rigby and her editorialising question. Much like yours, shamefully biased. If @BBCnews continues to distort and withhold information from viewers there will be trouble.
In this tweet alone, one can see a worst-case scenario emerging. Criticism of Johnson will be called ‘bias’. The BBC will be accused of ‘withholding information’, and threats will follow. Who’s to say that Kuenssberg or Rigby will definitely be invited to Downing Street press conferences under a Johnson premiership? That might sound hysterical, but the precedent is being set in Washington DC.
This is a qualitatively different state of affairs from the one masterminded by Campbell and Blair. The vision outlined by Pearson is one shared by Nigel Farage and the ‘Yellow Vests’ on the street who mobilise behind Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. If individual journalists pose difficult questions about a ‘no-deal Brexit’ (and its figureheads), then they are ‘biased’ Remainers. Carl Schmitt’s ‘friend–enemy’ distinction enters the press conference, and the leader only speaks to his friends.
Social media is a crucial ingredient in this, converting press conferences from a normal (indeed necessary) feature of constitutional democracy into a luxury, to be enjoyed or else dispensed with. What Trump demonstrates (and what May’s team couldn’t quite deal with) is that there is no symbiotic relationship between journalism and power any longer. Either the distinction between journalism and executive power dissolves altogether (as has happened with Fox News and the White House, and could soon be witnessed with the Daily Telegraph and Downing Street), or else politicians speak over the heads of the professional media altogether.
As important as media transformations have been, it’s unlikely that Britain would have reached this juncture if it weren’t for Brexit. It is Brexit that has injected what Schmitt termed ‘political theology’ into British politics, introducing questions of ‘sovereignty’ that are not amenable to empirical or reasoned discussion. It is Brexit, with the aid of social media, that has turned mass fury upon those institutions which hold up a mirror to society – not only Parliament, but experts and reporters. And it is Brexit that has provided Johnson with his long-sought opportunity to perform his pointless egotism on the highest stage in the land.
American journalists have struggled to know how to respond to Trump’s behaviour. The New York Times and Washington Post have set out a grand vision of hostile truth-telling, which fuels Trump’s persecution complex and gives him a steady flow of material to confirm that the media has it in for him. Johnson might welcome similar treatment, although the BBC would find it politically difficult to go for him (and for hard Brexit) in the same way that US news attacks Trump.
But there is an opportunity for journalistic collectivism and solidarity here. The BBC and the sceptical papers need to do what they can to avoid cooperating with Johnson’s messaging. An ‘exclusive’ Johnson column in the Telegraph or interview with the Sunday Times needn’t be headline news. An opinion poll published in the paper that pays Johnson £275,000 a year should be reported as internal to the race, rather than an objective picture of it. Above all, if on the rare occasions Johnson confronts journalistic scrutiny, there is intimidation of any sort, every member of the press should walk out leaving his tribe to fluff his ego undisturbed.
The Blizzard of Lies
Politics has never been a pursuit that requires total honesty. Nor, historically, has it been a vocation that scientists or other kinds of expert are drawn to. The New Labour era, which produced an elite career escalator linking university, think-tank, ministerial advice, Parliament and finally government, was an anomaly in the longer sweep of things. The reason there are so many mechanisms in place to remind powerful people of the actual facts of matters – mechanisms that include quangos and policy research institutes and publicly funded broadcasters – is that we assume they need constant reminding. A functioning constitution should be able to cope with the odd charlatan and bullshit artist, steering them gently away from the levers of power like a friend removing car keys from a drunk.
When we say that someone is ‘good with words’, we don’t mean they are reliable in how they relate them to things and deeds. On the contrary, the most brilliant rhetoricians or storytellers are those who can conjure an escape from the tedious constraints of the facts or past promises. However much the media pursues the question of Boris Johnson’s ‘character’, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that politics has ever been a truthfulness contest.
How much worse can things get? Quite a bit, it turns out. If politics has always attracted and to some extent rewarded the liar, the effect of Brexit on public life is that there is now a penalty attached to speaking the truth. The Conservative leadership contest is a curious spectator sport (save for the 160,000 electors with Conservative Party membership cards) in which the first contestant to accept reality is the loser. Words have now broken completely free of their factual moorings; Johnson and Jeremy Hunt seem committed to touring the nation and its television studios misreporting and misdescribing the economic, legal and political realities that will confront the next prime minister. To do otherwise would be an act of surrender.
Things have been drifting in this direction since the 2016 referendum campaign, with its infamous lie that ‘we send the EU £350 million a week’. Hardline Brexiteers now revel in their disregard for the statements of experts and fact-checkers, whom they lump together with the BBC, Channel 4, Whitehall and universities as part of a Remain tendency in public life. The beauty of ‘sovereignty’ as a political ideal is its metaphysical character, which evades efforts by economists and civil servants to pin it down, and seems to release political speech from the straitjacket of verifiable evidence.
Whole new vistas of political and cultural possibility seem to open up as a result. The political liar ‘is an actor by nature’, Hannah Arendt wrote. ‘He says what is not so because he wants things to be different from what they are – that is, he wants to change the world … Our ability to lie – but not necessarily our ability to tell the truth – belongs among the few obvious, demonstrable data that confirm human freedom.’8 Freedom is what this is all about. The complaint that ‘you can’t say anything any more’ is often heard as a grudge against ‘political correctness’, but the yearning to be able to say anything can just as easily find expression in support for the leader who will do precisely that, regardless of evidence.
From this perspective, the Remainer fixation on facts appears like a form of verbal constipation, to which Johnson’s gleeful freewheeling serves as the remedy. Note that the quality Johnson’s fans most applaud in him is cheerfulness, something Theresa May was never going to offer, suggesting that she may have missed the point of Brexit all along. The 2019 summer has taken on a carnivalesque quality; normal constraints around public speech have been suspended for the duration of a truth jubilee.
As this ‘cheerfulness’ is ratcheted up, the freedom to ‘say anything’ starts to engulf an expanding array of policy domains. With the leadership contest entering its final weeks, the same can-say attitude has been directed towards fiscal policy. Johnson and Hunt are now offering tax cuts and public spending increases which, by any account, would add tens of billions to the annual deficit (Labour claims that Johnson’s plans would add £57 billion, Hunt’s £43 billion) – when the vital necessity of reducing the deficit had previously been the Conservative justification for austerity.
Johnson has promised to end public-sector pay freezes. To get Britain through a ‘no-deal’ scenario, Hunt is invoking a positively Rooseveltian fiscal spirit, tweeting: ‘We spent just over £1 trillion bailing out the banks after the financial crisis. So if we did it for the bankers then why wouldn’t we now do what is needed for our fishermen and our farmers?’ Never one to be outdone in rhetorical hyperbole, Nigel Farage has started fleshing out a Brexit Party policy programme with a promise of £200 billion (more than the entire budget of the NHS and schools put together) to be invested in non-London regions.
An interesting subplot in this festival of Keynesian ideas is the status of broadband access. One of Johnson’s first policy announcements was to offer ‘full fibre to every home in the land’ by 2025, which civil engineers consider utterly unrealistic (the government’s current ‘aspiration’ to deliver it by 2033 is very optimistic). Farage has also fixated on faster broadband nationwide, plus free and fast wifi on buses and trains outside London. There was a time when the internet was identified with the ‘global village’ and hipster start-up culture; now it has become a key symbol and rallying point of non-metropolitan nationhood. The Farage-Johnson fantasy, it seems, is to weaken the cultural power of the large cities and university towns (those splodges of Remain on the Brexit map of England), and with it the influence of the BBC and Channel 4. Who really needs public service broadcasters in this high-speed internet future? Let a million YouTube channels bloom.
Loose talk is infectious and addictive. It begins with a dodgy claim on the side of a bus, and before you know it you’ve promised a spending spree so lavish that John McDonnell is accusing you of being ‘reckless’. But something significant has happened along the way that may cause particular concern to traditional Conservative sympathisers in the business and financial sectors. The claim that politicians are ‘liars’ can encompass two quite different kinds of lie. The first concerns facts – that is, things that have verifiably happened in the past. The ‘£350 million’ was this kind of lie: it excluded the money Britain had received back every week. It is this kind of lying that Donald Trump engages in compulsively, denying the public record, disowning past statements. It consists in a refusal to be bound by empirical data or by witnesses.
The second concerns broken promises, which is what many assume will happen once Johnson or Hunt enters Downing Street and is finally confronted by the realities of Brussels and Treasury bureaucracy. But until that future arrives, promises aren’t really lies so much as dubious pledges. What’s happened to British politics over the past three years is that, on discovering that it’s possible to lie about the past and get away with it, Conservatives now speak about the future as if there won’t really be one. Dishonesty about facts bleeds into dishonesty about intentions and prospects.
One might imagine that the first type of lie – the Trumpian one – is the more egregious. After all, if it’s an established fact that Europe’s trade surplus with the US is $101 billion, it’s surely monstrous to claim that it’s $151 billion. Such mendacity does a fundamental violence to the relationship between language and the world. But business and financial interests have often been far more worried by the second type of dishonesty, the failure to keep one’s word. Frankly, investors don’t really care about lies plastered on buses or asserted about the size of the crowd at an inauguration. If the next prime minister insists that the global climate cooled down in 2018 or that the European Union banned bendy bananas, it’s of no great concern to the CBI. It is when politicians start to talk big about the future that financiers get antsy.
Because investment is a future-oriented activity, one of the main threats that democracy poses to capitalism is that cast-iron policies, promises and rules can be tossed aside at any moment. It isn’t just voters who worry about politicians’ honesty: businesses worry that political words deployed as mere rhetoric, to win favour in the short term, can never reliably operate as a constraint. This problem has been especially acute in the era of neoliberal globalisation that emerged after the 1970s, as nation states have constantly sought to reassure international investors that they will stick to predictable regulatory, monetary and fiscal frameworks. Various instruments have been invented to achieve this, from central bank independence, which removes monetary policy from the domain of democratic politics, to the ‘stability and growth pact’ that has limited European Union member states’ fiscal freedoms since 1999, to Gordon Brown’s self-imposed ‘Golden Rule’, which stipulated public borrowing limits.
Business investors can cope with various models of capitalism, involving a wide range of tax rates, corporate governance systems and regulatory frameworks. What they can’t cope with is perpetual uncertainty. When political promises no longer hold their value over time, the value of a nation’s money will eventually suffer the same fate: inflation and devaluation are the consequence. (At its simplest, the neoliberal diagnosis of 1970s inflation was that too much democracy had led politicians and employers to make more promises than they were economically capable of honouring.) Contrary to everything George Osborne led us to believe, it isn’t deficit spending as such that threatens economic stability: it’s the fact that Johnson’s words offer scarcely any clue as to what he plans to do.
If the Conservative Party is about to draw a line under the era of austerity in such exuberant fashion it ought to be surprising. Then again, the right has often been less neurotic about prudence than the left (especially in the US); the right knows, after all, that it doesn’t have to work as hard as the left to win the trust of capital. But in the present atmosphere, few of Johnson or Hunt’s pledges seem likely to survive very far into the autumn. Spending commitments are being let off like fireworks, lighting up the night sky for the immediate pleasure of the 160,000 voters. Compared to Johnson’s ‘do or die’ promise to depart the EU on 31 October regardless of whether a deal is in place, pledging a few billion here and there is just noise.
But all this does pose worrying questions about what kind of democratic government will exist once the UK has got through the next six months of uncertainty. Who or what will voters and businesses be placing their trust in when political speech has finally been reconfigured as mere mood music, to be used to soothe or excite, but never to constrain? Politics could become riven by a kind of ‘front-stage/backstage’ duality, fronted by ‘cheerful’ figures speaking the language of sovereignty, while brushing aside the details of policy and spending for others to deal with. Like the reality of austerity, the reality of Brexit will become visible at some stage. But who’s to say that its cheerleaders will be prepared to recognise it as such?
Why Everyone Hates the ‘Mainstream Media’
We live in a time of political fury and hardening cultural divides. But if there is one thing on which virtually everyone is agreed, it is that the news and information we receive is biased. Every second of every day, someone is complaining about bias, in everything from the latest movie reviews to sports commentary to the BBC’s coverage of Brexit. These complaints and controversies take up a growing share of public discussion. Much of the outrage that floods social media, occasionally leaking into opinion columns and broadcast interviews, is not simply a reaction to events themselves, but to the way in which they are reported and framed. The ‘mainstream media’ is the principal focal point for this anger. Journalists and broadcasters who purport to be neutral are a constant object of scrutiny and derision, whenever they appear to let their personal views slip. The work of journalists involves an increasing amount of unscripted, real-time discussion, which provides an occasionally troubling window into their thinking.
But this is not simply an anti-journalist sentiment. A similar fury can just as easily descend on a civil servant or independent expert whenever their veneer of neutrality seems to crack, apparently revealing prejudices underneath. Sometimes a report or claim is dismissed as biased or inaccurate for the simple reason that it is unwelcome: to a Brexiteer, every bad economic forecast is just another case of the so-called project fear. A sense that the game is rigged now fuels public debate. This mentality spans the entire political spectrum and pervades societies around the world. One survey shows that the majority of people globally believe their society is broken and their economy is rigged.9 Both the left and the right feel misrepresented and misunderstood by political institutions and the media, but the anger is shared by many in the liberal centre, who believe that populists have gamed the system to harvest more attention than they deserve. Outrage at ‘mainstream’ institutions has become a mass sentiment.
This spirit of indignation was once the natural property of the left, which has long resented the establishment bias of the press. But in the present culture war, the right points to the universities, the BBC and the civil service as institutions that twist our basic understanding of reality to suit their own ends. Everyone can point to evidence that justifies their outrage. This arms race in cultural analysis is unwinnable.
This is not as simple as distrust. The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and the ubiquitous surveillance they enable has ushered in a new public mood that is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair and objective fashion. It is a mindset that begins with legitimate curiosity about what motivates a given media story, but which ends in a Trumpian refusal to accept any mainstream or official account of the world. We can all probably locate ourselves somewhere on this spectrum, between the curiosity of the engaged citizen and the corrosive cynicism of the climate denier. The question is whether this mentality is doing us any good, either individually or collectively.
Public life has become like a play whose audience is unwilling to suspend disbelief. Any utterance by a public figure can be unpicked in search of its ulterior motive. As cynicism grows, even judges, the supposedly neutral upholders of the law, are publicly accused of personal bias. Once doubt descends on public life, people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own beliefs about how the world really works. One effect of this is that facts no longer seem to matter (the phenomenon misleadingly dubbed ‘post-truth’). But the crises of democracy and of truth are one and the same: individuals are increasingly suspicious of the ‘official’ stories they are being told, and expect to witness things for themselves.
On one level, heightened scepticism towards the establishment is a welcome development. A more media-literate and critical citizenry ought to be less easy for the powerful to manipulate. It may even represent a victory for the type of cultural critique pioneered by intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall in the 1970s and ’80s, revealing the injustices embedded in everyday cultural expressions and interactions. But it is possible to have too much scepticism. How exactly do we distinguish this critical mentality from that of the conspiracy theorist, who is convinced that they alone have seen through the official version of events? Or to turn the question around, how might it be possible to recognise the most flagrant cases of bias in the behaviour of reporters and experts, but nevertheless to accept that what they say is often a reasonable depiction of the world?
It is tempting to blame the internet, populists or foreign trolls for flooding our otherwise rational society with lies. But this underestimates the scale of the technological and philosophical transformations that are underway. The single biggest change in our public sphere is that we now have an unimaginable excess of news and content, where once we had scarcity. Suddenly, the analogue channels and professions we depended on for our knowledge of the world have come to seem partial, slow and dispensable. And yet, contrary to initial hype surrounding big data, the explosion of information available to us is making it harder, not easier, to achieve consensus on truth. As the quantity of information increases, the need to pick out bite-size pieces of content rises accordingly. In this radically sceptical age, questions of where to look, what to focus on and who to trust are ones that we increasingly seek to answer for ourselves, without the help of intermediaries. This is a liberation of sorts, but it is also at the heart of our deteriorating confidence in public institutions.
The data deluge
The current threat to democracy is often seen to emanate from new forms of propaganda, with the implication that lies are being deliberately fed to a naive and over-emotional public. The simultaneous rise of populist parties and digital platforms has triggered well-known anxieties regarding the fate of truth in democratic societies. Fake news and internet echo chambers are believed to manipulate and ghettoise certain communities, for shadowy ends. Key groups – millennials or the white working class, say – are accused of being easily persuadable, thanks to their excessive sentimentality.
This diagnosis exaggerates old-fashioned threats while overlooking new phenomena. Over-reliant on analogies to twentieth-century totalitarianism, it paints the present moment as a moral conflict between truth and lies, with an unthinking public passively consuming the results. But our relationship to information and news is now entirely different: it has become an active and critical one, deeply suspicious of the official line. Nowadays, everyone is engaged in spotting and rebutting propaganda of one kind or another, curating our news feeds, attacking the framing of the other side and consciously resisting manipulation. In some ways, we have become too concerned with truth, to the point where we can no longer agree on it. The very institutions that might have once brought controversies to an end are under constant fire for their compromises and biases.
The threat of misinformation and propaganda should not be denied. As the scholars Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts have shown in their book Network Propaganda, there is now a self-sustaining information ecosystem on the American right, through which conspiracy theories and untruths get recycled, between Breitbart, Fox News, talk radio and social media.10 Meanwhile, the anti-vax movement is becoming a serious public health problem across the world, aided by the online circulation of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science. This is a situation where simple misinformation poses a serious threat to society.
But away from these eye-catching cases, things look less clear-cut. The majority of people in northern Europe still regularly encounter mainstream news and information. Britain is a long way from the US experience, thanks principally to the presence of the BBC, which, for all its faults, still performs a basic function in providing a common informational experience. It is treated as a primary source of news by 60 per cent of people in the UK. Even 42 per cent of Brexit Party and UKIP voters get their news from the BBC. The panic surrounding echo chambers and so-called filter bubbles is largely groundless. If we think of an echo chamber as a sealed environment, which only circulates opinions and facts that are agreeable to its participants, it is a rather implausible phenomenon. Research by the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that just 8 per cent of the UK public are at risk of becoming trapped in such a clique.11
Trust in the media is low, but this entrenched scepticism long predates the internet or contemporary populism. From the Sun’s lies about Hillsborough to the BBC’s failure to expose Jimmy Savile as early as they might have, to the fevered enthusiasm for the Iraq War that gripped much of Fleet Street, the British public has had plenty of good reasons to distrust journalists. Even so, the number of people in the UK who trust journalists to tell the truth has actually risen slightly since the 1980s.12
What, then, has changed? The key thing is that the elites of government and the media have lost their monopoly over the provision of information, but retain their prominence in the public eye. They have become more like celebrities, anti-heroes or figures in a reality TV show. And digital platforms now provide a public space in which to identify and rake over the flaws, biases and falsehoods of mainstream institutions. The result is increasingly sceptical citizens, each seeking to manage their media diet, checking up on individual journalists in order to resist the pernicious influence of the establishment.
There are clear and obvious benefits to this, where it allows hateful and manipulative journalism to be called out. But it also generates a mood of outrage, which is far more focused on denouncing bad and biased reporting than on defending the alternative. Across the political spectrum, we are increasingly distracted and enraged by what our adversaries deem important and how they frame it. Often it is not the media’s lies that provoke the greatest fury online, but the discovery that an important event has been ignored or downplayed, or conversely elevated unduly. While it is true that arguments rage over dodgy facts and figures (concerning climate change or the details of Britain’s trading relations), many of the most bitter controversies of our news cycle concern the framing and weighting of different issues and how they are reported, rather than the facts of what actually happened.
The problem we face is not, then, that certain people are oblivious to the ‘mainstream media’, or are victims of fake news, but that we are all seeking to see through the veneer of facts and information provided to us by public institutions. Facts and official reports are no longer the end of the story. Such scepticism is healthy and, in many ways, the just deserts of an establishment that has been caught twisting the truth too many times. But political problems arise once we turn against all representations and framings of reality, on the basis that they are compromised and biased – as if some purer, unmediated access to the truth might be possible instead. This is a seductive, but misleading ideal.
Journalism without journalists
Every human culture throughout history has developed ways to record experiences and events, allowing them to endure. From early modern times, liberal societies have developed a wide range of institutions and professions whose work ensures that events do not simply pass without trace or public awareness. Newspapers and broadcasters share reports, photographs and footage of things that have happened in politics, business, society and culture. Court documents and the Hansard parliamentary reports provide records of what has been said in law courts and in Parliament. Systems of accounting, auditing and economics help to establish basic facts about what takes place in businesses and markets.
Traditionally, it is through these systems, which are grounded in written testimonies and public statements, that we have learned what is going on in the world. But in the past twenty years, this patchwork of record-keeping has been supplemented and threatened by a radically different system, which is transforming the nature of empirical evidence and memory. One term for this is ‘big data’, which highlights the exponential growth in the quantity of data that societies create, thanks to digital technologies.
The reason there is so much data today is that more and more of our social lives are mediated digitally. Internet browsers, smartphones, social media platforms, smart cards and every other smart interface record every move we make. Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are constantly leaving traces of our activities, no matter how trivial. But it is not the escalating quantity of data that constitutes the radical change. Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from previous epochs. In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon events that were already acknowledged as important. Journalists did not just report news, but determined what counted as newsworthy. TV crews turned up at events that were deemed of national significance. The rest of us kept our cameras for noteworthy occasions, such as holidays and parties.
The ubiquity of digital technology has thrown all of this up in the air. Things no longer need to be judged ‘important’ to be captured. Consciously, we photograph events and record experiences regardless of their importance. Unconsciously, we leave a trace of our behaviour every time we swipe a smart card, address Amazon’s Alexa or touch our phone. For the first time in human history, recording now happens by default, and the question of significance is addressed separately.
This shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding the possibilities for human knowledge. As many of the original evangelists of big data liked to claim, when everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories. Instead, they argued, the data can simply ‘speak for itself’. Patterns will emerge, traces will come to light. This holds out the prospect of some purer truth than the one presented to us by professional editors or trained experts. As the Australian surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has brilliantly articulated, this is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.
Andrejevic argues that the rise of this fantasy coincides with a growing impatience at the efforts of reporters and experts to frame reality in meaningful ways. He writes that ‘we might describe the contemporary media moment – and its characteristic attitude of sceptical savviness regarding the contrivance of representation – as one that implicitly embraces the ideal of framelessness’.13 From this perspective, every controversy can in principle be settled thanks to the vast trove of data – CCTV, records of digital activity and so on – now available to us. Reality in its totality is being recorded, and reporters and officials look dismally compromised by comparison.
One way in which a seemingly frameless media has transformed public life over recent years is in the elevation of photography and video as arbiters of truth, as opposed to written testimony or numbers. ‘Pics or it didn’t happen’ is a jokey barb sometimes thrown at social media users when they share some unlikely experience. It is often a single image that seems to capture the truth of an event, only now there are cameras everywhere. No matter how many times it is disproven, the notion that ‘the camera doesn’t lie’ has a peculiar hold over our imaginations. In a society of blanket CCTV and smartphones, there are more cameras than people, and the torrent of data adds to the sense that the truth is somewhere amid the deluge, ignored by mainstream accounts. The central demand of this newly sceptical public is ‘so show me’.
This transformation in our recording equipment is responsible for much of the outrage directed at those formerly tasked with describing the world. The rise of blanket surveillance technologies has paradoxical effects, raising expectations for objective knowledge to unrealistic levels, and then provoking fury when those in the public eye do not meet them.
On the one hand, data science appears to make the question of objective truth easier to settle. The slow and imperfect institutions of social science and journalism can be circumvented, and we can get directly to reality itself, unpolluted by human bias. Surely, in this age of mass data capture, the truth will become undeniable. On the other hand, as the quantity of data becomes overwhelming – greater than human intelligence can comprehend – our ability to agree on the nature of reality seems to be declining. Once everything is, in principle, recordable, disputes heat up regarding what counts as significant in the first place. It turns out that the ‘frames’ that journalists and experts use to reduce and organise information are indispensable to its coherence and meaning.
What we are discovering is that, once the limitations on data capture are removed, there are escalating opportunities for conflict over the nature of reality. Every time a mainstream media agency reports the news, they can instantly be met with the retort: but what about this other event, in another time and another place, that you failed to report? What about the bits you left out? What about the other voters in the town you didn’t talk to? When editors judge the relative importance of stories, they now confront a panoply of alternative judgements. Where records are abundant, fights break out over relevance and meaning.
Professional editors have always faced the challenge of reducing long interviews to short consumable chunks or discarding the majority of photos or text. Editing is largely a question of what to throw away. This necessitates value judgements, that readers and audiences once had little option but to trust. Now, however, the question of which image or sentence is truly significant opens irresolvable arguments. One person’s offcut is another person’s revealing nugget.
Political agendas can be pursued this way, including cynical ones aimed at painting one’s opponents in the worst possible light. An absurd or extreme voice can be represented as typical of a political movement (known as ‘nutpicking’). Taking quotes out of context is one of the most disruptive of online ploys, which provokes far more fury than simple insults. Rather than deploying lies or ‘fake news’, it messes with the significance of data, taking the fact that someone did say or write something, but violating their intended meaning. No doubt professional journalists have always descended to such tactics from time to time, but now we are all at it, provoking a vicious circle of misrepresentation.
Then consider the status of photography and video. It is not just that photographic evidence can be manipulated to mislead, but that questions will always survive regarding camera angle and context. What happened before or after a camera started rolling? What was outside the shot? These questions provoke suspicion, often with good reason.
The most historic example of such a controversy predates digital media. The Zapruder film, which captured the assassination of John F. Kennedy, became the most scrutinised piece of footage in history. The film helped spawn countless conspiracy theories, with individual frames becoming the focus of competing theories as to what they reveal. The difficulty of completely squaring any narrative with a photographic image is a philosophical one as much as anything, and the Zapruder film gave a glimpse of the sorts of media disputes that have become endemic now cameras are a ubiquitous part of our social lives and built environments.
While we are now able to see evidence for ourselves, we all have conflicting ideas of what bit to attend to, and what it means. The camera may not lie, but that is because it does not speak at all. As we become more fixated on some ultimate gold standard of objective truth, which exceeds the words of mere journalists or experts, so the number of interpretations applied to the evidence multiplies. As our faith in the idea of undeniable proof deepens, so our frustration with competing framings and official accounts rises. All too often, the charge of ‘bias’ means ‘that’s not my perspective’. Our screen-based interactions with many institutions have become fuelled by anger that our experiences are not being better recognised, along with a new pleasure at being able to complain about it. As the writer and programmer Paul Ford wrote, back in 2011, ‘the fundamental question of the web’ is: ‘Why wasn’t I consulted?’14
Digital populism
What we are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. This has echoes of the populist challenge to liberal democracy, which pits direct expressions of the popular will against parliaments and judges, undermining the very possibility of compromise. The Brexit crisis exemplifies this as well as anything. Liberals and Remainers adhere to the long-standing constitutional convention that the public speaks via the institutions of general elections and Parliament. Adamant Brexiteers believe that the people spoke for themselves in June 2016, and have been thwarted ever since by MPs and civil servants. It is this latter logic that paints suspending Parliament as an act of democracy.
This is the tension that many populist leaders exploit. Officials and elected politicians are painted as cynically self-interested, while the ‘will of the people’ is both pure and obvious. Attacks on the mainstream media follow an identical script: the individuals professionally tasked with informing the public, in this case journalists, are biased and fake. It is widely noted that leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Matteo Salvini are enthusiastic users of Twitter, and Boris Johnson has recently begun to use Facebook Live to speak directly to ‘the people’ from Downing Street. Whether it be parliaments or broadcasters, the analogue intermediaries of the public sphere are discredited and circumvented.
What can professional editors and journalists do in response? One option is to shout even louder about their commitment to ‘truth’, as some American newspapers have profitably done in the face of Trump. But this escalates cultural conflict, and fails to account for how the media and informational landscape has changed in the past twenty years.
What if, instead, we accepted the claim that all reports about the world are simply framings of one kind or another, which cannot but involve political and moral ideas about what counts as important? After all, reality becomes incoherent and overwhelming unless it is simplified and narrated in some way or other. And what if we accepted that journalists, editors and public figures will inevitably let cultural and personal biases slip from time to time? A shrug is often the more appropriate response than a howl. If we abandoned the search for some pure and unbiased truth, where might our critical energies be directed instead?
If we recognise that reporting is always a political act (at least in the sense that it asserts the importance of one story rather than another), then the key question is not whether it is biased, but whether it is independent of financial or political influence. The problem becomes a quasi-constitutional one, of what processes, networks and money determine how data gets turned into news, and how power gets distributed. On this front, the British media is looking worse and worse with every year that passes. The relationship between the government and the press has been getting tighter since the 1980s. This is partly thanks to the overweening power of Rupert Murdoch, and the image management that developed in response. Spin doctors such as Alastair Campbell, Andy Coulson, Tom Baldwin, Robbie Gibb and Seumas Milne typically moved from the media into party politics, weakening the division between the two.
Then there are those individuals who shift backwards and forwards between senior political positions and the BBC, such as Gibb, Rona Fairhead and James Purnell. The press has taken a very bad turn over recent years, with ex-chancellor George Osborne becoming editor of the Evening Standard, then the extraordinary recent behaviour of the Daily Telegraph, which seeks to present whatever story or gloss is most supportive of their former star columnist in 10 Downing Street, and rubbishes his opponents.
Since the financial crisis of 2008, there have been regular complaints about the revolving door between the financial sector and governmental institutions around the world, most importantly the White House. There has been far less criticism of the similar door that links the media and politics. The exception to this comes from populist leaders, who routinely denounce all ‘mainstream’ democratic and media institutions as a single liberal elite that acts against the will of the people. One of the reasons they are able to do this is because there is a grain of truth in what they say.
The financial obstacles confronting critical, independent, investigative media are significant. If the Johnson administration takes a more sharply populist turn, the political obstacles could increase, too – Channel 4 is frequently held up as an enemy of Brexit, for example. But let us be clear that an independent, professional media is what we need to defend at the present moment, and abandon the misleading and destructive idea that – thanks to a combination of ubiquitous data capture and personal passions – the truth can be grasped directly, without anyone needing to report it.
Mutations of leadership
Where to start with the sheer strangeness, let alone the danger, of the current situation in British politics? One place would be with the three characters at the centre of events. As the tectonic plates of the British State rumble ominously, take a moment to register quite how strange it is that the headlines should be dominated by the figures of Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Dominic Cummings. Absent the idiosyncrasies of these men, and how they determine their interactions, the present crisis would be playing out in a different way entirely.
The central fact of Johnson’s political career is that he has harboured a desire for high office since he was a child (we are told), but had scant interest in what he might do with it should he get it. David Cameron explained that he wanted to be prime minister ‘because I think I’d be good at it’, but this is something Johnson has never maintained about himself. The evidence to the contrary is already accumulating rapidly. And yet, there he sits, unelected but in office, a wish fulfilled.
Johnson has no ideology and no philosophy. It isn’t even clear he has ambition, beyond making a point of having got where he’s got. His residence in 10 Downing Street represents a personal triumph, which he will want to prolong as long as possible, by whatever means possible. It is a reflection on Britain’s constitution that it is being pushed to its limit by a man who has no vision of the nation beyond his own pre-eminence in it. The media spent the Conservative leadership election posing questions about Johnson’s ‘character’, yet the graver and more complicated question is how the Tory party and the Westminster village allowed themselves to become vehicles for one man’s personal fantasy. Johnson has the single political advantage of being well known by the public, but he is scarcely liked, let alone admired. The reality is that his main qualification for office is that he wants it more than anyone else. Brought low by decades of division and ideological torpor, Conservative MPs seemed unable to imagine any better credential.
Rarely can the term Her Majesty’s Opposition have resonated as strongly as when Johnson and Corbyn faced each other across the dispatch box in the House of Commons. The differences between these men go well beyond policy or ideology; they reach into more basic questions of human psychology and what Max Weber called the ‘vocation’ of politics. Corbyn, of course, never wanted to lead anything, let alone the country. It wasn’t until the age of sixty-six, when it was ‘his turn’ to stand as the left-wing candidate in a Labour leadership election, that he was thrust into the position of prospective prime minister.
The result, now that Johnson is in Downing Street, is a quite extraordinary polarity. We have one leader who has spent his entire life imagining himself standing on the steps of Number 10 (it was noted that, as he entered for the first time as prime minister, he was waving with one hand, while the other rested in his suit pocket, thumb protruding – an exact replica of a favourite Churchill pose), and another leader who was past retirement age before the daunting prospect even occurred to him. We have one man whose entire career has been built on passionate ethical commitments, most notably as an anti-war campaigner and advocate of Palestinian rights, and another who seems devoid of a single enduring belief.
Corbyn, to be sure, has demonstrated more political acumen, and above all more tenacity, than many would have predicted in the summer of 2015. He has also picked up political skills that Johnson was supposed to have learned at Eton and Oxford, but plainly didn’t. Johnson’s supporters in the House of Commons have had many disappointing reality checks over the course of his short premiership, but none can have been more distressing than the sight of their leader flailing around at Prime Minister’s Questions, as Corbyn took him to pieces. What, after all, is the point of Johnson, if he can’t dismiss his opponents with a clever turn of phrase? What, indeed, is the point of the Oxford Union, if one of its most celebrated presidents can’t win a debate against an Islington hippy? The proroguing of Parliament couldn’t come soon enough for Johnson.
Yet no matter how skilfully Corbyn plays his hand in the short term, it’s his CV and his freakish pathway to the leadership that will always count more heavily. And this is integral to the political impasse created by Brexit. If Corbyn were a ‘normal’ leader, who had risen to the leadership by a typical route, there would be a simple way out of this crisis: a vote of no confidence would be called, and the leader of the opposition would be invited to form a coalition government. Given the impressive levels of cooperation across the ‘rebel alliance’ of Labour, Liberal Democrats, SNP and Tory rebels, the new prime minister would have every chance of working out a Brexit policy that could get through the House of Commons. But the prospect of a Corbyn government has become an exceptional factor in all of this: it’s the one thing that hardcore Leavers see as worse than remaining, and the one thing hardcore Remainers see as worse than leaving.
What is it about Corbyn that puts him beyond the pale? There are several reasons for the widespread animosity towards him, foremost among them the sustained problem of antisemitism that has dogged the party under his leadership. But it’s not clear that this alone renders his premiership unthinkable. Conservative newspapers and columnists refer to his ‘Marxism’ as a shorthand way of painting him as dangerous. But this has always been something of a red herring. Unlike John McDonnell (who cut his teeth as chair of finance at the radical GLC in the early 1980s), Corbyn has shown little interest in economic policy during his career, dedicating far more energy to opposing imperialism abroad than economics at home. In any case, recent noises from the City suggest that even the banks are now far better disposed towards a Corbyn government (which would at the very least ensure a customs union with Europe) than a no-deal Johnson administration.
There is a more fundamental reason why, as far as many Westminster insiders and much of the public are concerned, Corbyn cannot become prime minister, and it has nothing to do with putting workers on company boards: he is ideologically opposed to the use of violence. This is why questions surrounding national security and nuclear war will always dog him, and why, when push comes to shove, even many centrists would prefer the chaos of no deal, overseen by a mendacious man-child, to Prime Minister Corbyn. At least that mendacious man-child will be willing to use the full range of tools at the state’s disposal.
Weber saw modern political leadership as a balancing act between commitment to ultimate goals, and responsibility for the potentially devastating tools that the state uses to pursue them. Too much of the former (‘an ethic of ultimate ends’) and you have delusional zealotry, oblivious to the harm that is done in the service of idealism. Too much of the latter, and you have machine politics, where energy is focused on questions of efficiency and delivery. But whatever the circumstances, the ultimate tool of the state is always violence, and a ‘responsible’ politician is one who keeps this brute truth in mind.
By Weber’s definition it isn’t clear that a pacifist can ever be a politician, let alone a national leader. Or rather, it isn’t possible to remain a pacifist once you have taken charge of a modern state. You either assume ‘responsibility’ for the violent operation you are leading, or continue reciting your dogma of ‘ultimate ends’ while turning your back on the consequences. It’s well known that on the day a new prime minister takes office their duties include writing a letter to nuclear submarine commanders, giving them instructions on what action to take in the event that Britain has been wiped out in a nuclear attack. There is a deathly substrate to the state and its highest offices that seems almost ontologically incompatible with Jeremy Corbyn’s image of himself. This is the reason his followers adore him, and the reason too that the (far larger) ranks of sceptics will never accept him as part of a compromise.
Weber had Johnson’s number. He warned against the politician whose ‘vanity’ turns the pursuit of power into a ‘purely personal self-intoxication’, who strives ‘for the glamorous semblance of power, rather than for actual power’. And yet, because ‘striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power’.15 Johnson may be in it for the posh banquets and Churchillian photos, but the consequences are far, far weightier. It is because he is so uninterested in consequences that he has delegated so much power to his chief strategist.
Dominic Cummings has become an object of fascination thanks to his brazen disregard for rules and his dabbling in the exotic arts of rationalist theorising. His dense and rambling blogposts, among them the interminable ‘Some thoughts on education and political priorities’, are now the site of an archaeological dig for anyone seeking to divine the underlying logic of Johnson’s apparently chaotic administration. There is a guilty frisson in the idea of a lawless nihilist pulling all the strings, but to grasp the danger Cummings poses, one has to start by recognising how ordinary his core assumptions are. One thing that is certain and consistent in the Cummings outlook is that MPs are a pompous waste of space, and civil servants are a cartel of self-interested cowards, whose main function is thwarting policy. These views are thought appalling in Westminster and Whitehall for obvious reasons, but in pubs up and down the country, they are almost an orthodoxy.
What is unusual is not that Cummings should hold these views, but that he has held them while pursuing a career in Whitehall. His condemnation of a stagnant public sector is seen as common sense in much of the business world, especially the world of e-government contractors and public sector outsourcing, whose shtick rests on the idea that government is crap at doing stuff. Tony Blair’s obsession with ‘public service modernisation’, built on the creed that ‘what matters is what works’, provided an adjacent justification for outsourcing and endless managerial reforms: they would, it was said, inject more dynamism, efficiency and ‘leadership’ into the public sector. Cummings is in some ways the logical conclusion of this relentless modernising mentality, in which the state is always deficient in comparison to business.
Except, of course, that it isn’t just public services he is trying to shake up. His antipathy to stasis now seems to apply to virtually any convention or institution of British public life. The Conservative Party, the House of Commons, the ‘purdah’ rules (which seek to prevent the civil service being used for political ends during an election campaign), data protection, normal relations with the media, the Electoral Commission, and possibly the rule of law itself, are all viewed as obstacles to circumvent in pursuit of some goal. His boss’s goal is clear: to remain in Downing Street. What Cummings wants, other than the further humiliation of British elites, is less clear. For the time being, though, Johnson’s possession of an attack dog, willing to tear away at the basic conditions of liberal democracy, looks like an electoral asset, now that a sizeable proportion of the electorate has decided that democracy is a sham.
So: a prime minister who is in office mainly because he so badly wants to be; a leader of the opposition who is both loved and loathed for being so unlike a political leader; and a government strategist who despises government. It is as if a conventional modern politician had been broken in three: add Johnson’s personal ambition to Corbyn’s piety, and combine them with Cummings’s technocratic zeal, and you might get someone a bit like Blair – the very model of the ‘responsible’ politician Weber had in mind, and the last thing most voters want right now. We are living with the consequences of a prolonged and deepening anti-politics.
Deference to our sometime political superiors has been in decline for more than half a century. The sense of alarm when (apparently on Cummings’s instruction) twenty-one Conservative MPs were purged from the party for voting in favour of an extension to Article 50 was partly a reflection of the ruthlessness of that action, but also an expression of sentimental feeling for the old duffers being punished. In their crumpled suits and schoolboy ties they seemed so harmless! When the grandson of Winston Churchill (Sir Nicholas Soames) and the great-great-grandson of Lord Salisbury (Richard Benyon) are being booted out, it would seem that the age of cap-doffing is well and truly over. But Cummings was merely accelerating a trend.
How does liberal democracy work, once tradition, class and culture no longer identify appropriate governors? The success of neoliberalism, which emerged as a new policy paradigm in the late 1970s, derived as much from its solution to this problem as from its economic outcomes, which have always been questionable. At the heart of neoliberal philosophy was the idea that markets are smarter than governments because they factor in millions of ordinary opinions and expectations, whereas governments rely on a coterie of over-confident experts and planners. Markets aren’t just efficient, but democratic. They give everyone a say.
Privatisation, deregulation, PFI and other pro-market reforms worked with the grain of a public that was increasingly sceptical of public authorities and politics in general. Blair’s gambit was that only by keeping pace with the expectations of an increasingly consumerist culture could public services retain credibility and support. This may have been true in the medium term, but eventually it leaves the public sector without any justification or cultural identity of its own. It is a state-led strategy for hollowing out and talking down public service (as distinct from business), one that was followed even as New Labour was pouring unprecedented sums of money into public services.
Meanwhile, Parliament and parties did less and less. Party membership and electoral turn-outs declined. It isn’t irrelevant that the period in which publics across the world slowly deserted their political institutions was also one of economic stability and policy consensus. Politics no longer seemed to provide answers to the questions that mattered, either to citizens or to policymakers. This was the crucible of the Cummings worldview.
It’s now clear that the financial crisis of 2008, and the years of austerity that followed, had the effect of discrediting neoliberal dogmas about the market, but – contrary to the initial hopes of the left – without restoring confidence in government or democracy. A diffuse mood of anti-elitism, targeted at business, media, politics and government, has created a residual sense that institutions have been rigged by insiders. Johnson, Corbyn and Cummings, each in his own way, harness and express this populist instinct. Each is jostling to be the beneficiary of institutional decay.
The danger for Labour, which is also the danger for liberal democracy, is that the EU referendum has become viewed by many Leavers (and their sympathisers in the media) as the only uncorrupted political institution left. The Johnson-Cummings script is a beautifully simple one: ‘the people’ spoke in June 2016, but the politicians weren’t prepared to listen. The more enemies Johnson makes in Westminster, Whitehall and the courts, the more he demonstrates his fidelity to the one true act of democracy. The more often he is defeated – even to the point of humiliation – the more he proves his mettle to the 17.4 million who have been denied what they were promised. Corbyn’s defence of Parliament and the rule of law makes him look statesmanlike, but it also exposes him to the attack lines that will be deployed once the Cummings electoral machine kicks into gear in the autumn.
But nailing Corbyn as part of ‘the elite’ is scarcely going to wash. He can’t be the face of Parliament and a threat to national security. He can’t be a liberal Remainer and an insurrectionary Marxist. As Theresa May found in June 2017, Corbyn is a much trickier political opponent than he often appears to be, and he remains the most plausible alternative to another Johnson-Cummings government. Before very long, we will be witnessing an electoral showdown between the man who would do anything to appear ‘prime ministerial’, and the one who has often appeared anything but. These are strange and unpredictable forms of authority; only a fool would claim to know which way it will go.
The Party of Resentment
What does the Conservative Party stand for in 2019? If you survey the central tenets of Tory ideology from the past fifty years, it is hard to find a single one that is still intact. The party of business is hell-bent on undermining access to an export market of half a billion people. The party of law and order is now raging against the judiciary – with senior Tories being regularly asked whether their government intends to obey the law. The party of ‘family values’ – ‘back to basics’, as John Major put it – has now fallen for the charms of a famous philanderer, who reportedly doesn’t know how many children he has. The party of the establishment is provoking a constitutional crisis, angering the Queen and expelling some of its most distinguished MPs from its benches.
So perhaps the more pertinent question is whether there is anything the Conservative Party won’t stand for. But the answer to that isn’t much clearer either: the Johnson-Cummings strategy depends on cultivating the sense that they will say or do anything to achieve their ends; their only principle is a refusal to rule anything out. And to the extent that they face any constraints, these are not coming from inside the Conservative Party.
Surviving Tory moderates kid themselves that the problem is all with Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, as if they hadn’t fallen into line behind a man famed for dishonesty and recklessness. They kid themselves that the party is still theirs, as if it hadn’t swelled with Brexit fanatics with no interest in governing. The fact that Amber Rudd resigned (in September 2019) simultaneously from the cabinet and the Conservative whip clarified the stakes: the current toxicity belongs to the party, not any individual strategist or leader.
For a party that had been losing its political and philosophical moorings for many years, Brexit has become a substitute for ideology – something more potent and emotional than just a vision for a good society or a policy manifesto. For Conservative Party members and many MPs, Brexit is almost theological: it is a crusade requiring sacrifice and suffering. It is not possible that the reality of Brexit will ever live up to the divine version, while parliamentary democracy now appears hopelessly compromised in comparison with the pure ‘will of the people’ that the 2016 referendum is believed to have revealed.
This fanaticism is being escalated and exploited by men without any apparent ideology of their own, or even any particular faith in Brexit. On the actual question posed by the referendum, Boris Johnson was famously ambivalent. And after writing tens of thousands of words about British politics on his own blog, it’s still not clear how Cummings really thinks society should look, or if he even identifies as a ‘conservative’. These men are opportunists, for whom nationalist fervour and chaos provide an opening to seize power. And a party in the grip of collective mania is more vulnerable to such machinations than one with a coherent ideology.
To pinpoint the origins of this ideological decline, one has to look back much further than the referendum. The identity and purpose of the Conservative Party has been slowly unravelling for three decades. The year of the ‘big bang’ was 1986, when the City of London was dramatically deregulated, disrupting the old-boy networks of Britain’s business classes with the shock of a new, aggressive style of international finance. The subsequent explosion of wealth opened up a cultural and financial schism between London and England – sowing seeds of resentment in the shires that would blossom in 2016.
But 1986 was also the high point of Tory Europeanism, the year of the Single European Act, which set Europe on the path to a single market, and was driven and crafted by Margaret Thatcher and her allies. Before this point, the crusade for ‘free markets’ was an ideological rallying cry for the New Right backers of Ronald Reagan and Thatcher – a soaring ambition that could only be brought to fruition by brave leaders in their mould. Now it would become a technocratic and regulatory project, overseen by bureaucrats and lawyers. With the demise of state socialism three years later, capitalism no longer needed the Conservative Party. And business soon found a better friend in New Labour – which offered state-of-the-art regulation and a culture of innovation – than it has found before or since.
Over those thirty years, there was one force in Britain’s public life that never gave up on the Tories: the press. All those resentments that took the place of Conservative ideology – the loathing of multiculturalism, Brussels, Blairism, immigration, and the vast riches being made in London – were given a safe space in the pages of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph. With their constant attacks on all symptoms of liberal globalisation, these papers provided the incubator for the rage currently sweeping British politics, during the long years when national borders and rural England were out of political fashion.
With one of those newspapers’ favourite sons ensconced in Number 10, the boundary between the opinion pages and Westminster has dissolved. The resentments that had brewed for decades – towards ‘political correctness’ and the milieu of metropolitan graduates – now flood public life, with the arrival of a prime minister who speaks his mind as recklessly at the dispatch box as he once did on the page. What these forces of reaction stand for is not ‘free markets’ or ‘private enterprise’, but the sort of back-scratching, long-lunching privileges that once made the establishment tick.
The collapsing division between the Conservative Party and the conservative press has produced an optical illusion in which the concerns of the party are constantly mistaken for those of the country. One of the curiosities of David Cameron’s recent round of memoir-promoting interviews was his complete inability to distinguish between ‘Europe’ as a problem facing the nation (where fewer than 10 per cent of the public deemed it to be an important issue, right up to 2016), and Europe as a problem ripping through the Tory party.
No explanation of Brexit – and hence of the worst political crisis in living memory – can escape the truth that it was born, nurtured and released into society from the Conservative backbenches. The party has done for British democracy what derivatives did to the financial sector – and it has so far survived the carnage it produced. Instead, blame for the chaos has been sprayed in all directions: on to Europeans, Labour, Remainers and ‘the elites’, thanks to the symbiotic relationship between party and press.
Johnson could win a workable majority in the next few months. And yet there’s a marked absence of triumphalism in the party. The current poll lead feels precarious; 59 per cent of Tory members have already voted for the Brexit Party once (in the European Parliament elections), and many could well do so in future. The Conservatives are now to the Brexit Party what cocaine is to crack: more acceptable in polite company, but ultimately made of the same stuff. Rage and resentment are powerful political forces, but dangerously unpredictable. Unlike a newspaper columnist, a prime minister takes far more flak than he dishes out, and Johnson now appears harried and uncomfortable. Lacking any positive vision of the economy or society, he and Cummings are entirely reliant on channelling resentment towards various foes, from Supreme Court justices to Jeremy Corbyn. The newspapers will do their bit by escalating the attacks. But these nemeses cannot soak up all that anger indefinitely. The forces behind Brexit will need new scapegoats soon – and Johnson, Cummings and the Conservative Party could be next in line.
The Berlusconification of Britain
If this general election campaign has a distinctive mood, it is a mix of bewilderment, outrage and exhaustion. The public sphere has been engulfed by a war of attrition in which every poll number, media statement or policy announcement must be treated with suspicion. What is it concealing? Who paid for it? What is it distracting us from? The rules of engagement seem alien and unstable. Apart from the trolls-for-hire running the Conservative Party digital media strategy, it’s hard to imagine that anyone is enjoying this. Political campaigns have always been an exercise in attention-seeking and the sabotaging of opponents’ messaging, deploying classic military tactics of surprise and deception in the process, but this has now escalated to a point where meaningful argument has become all but impossible. Stand back for a moment, and a bigger question dawns: is this what the end of liberalism feels like?
If 2016 was the year that liberals discovered the vulnerability of ‘fact-based’ political campaigning, 2019 feels more like a wholesale institutional crisis. Liberal democracy depends on public confidence that certain rules and structures are beyond political influence or manipulation, basic journalistic norms of reporting included. Even if the media has never been perfectly neutral or independent, they have traditionally occupied a separate – if sometimes overlapping – sphere to the political parties and leaders they report on. And so, with considerable imperfections, the media once provided a stage for the contest between rival parties. Now this distinction – between the frame around politics and its contents – appears to have dissolved. Never before have the media been so internal to the arguments that have played out over the course of an election campaign. It seems that every televised debate, interview (or avoidance thereof ) and journalist’s tweet sets off a fresh conflict of attack and counter-attack, dragging supposedly impartial bodies such as the BBC into the theatre of informational war.
The immediate catalyst for our current chaos lies in the reckless strand of conservatism that now dominates the Tory party, thanks to the crisis of Brexit and the opportunism of Boris Johnson. The mentality of this New Right is one that is hostile to the very idea of ‘neutral’ or ‘independent’ institutions as checks on power; they are viewed as sclerotic and self-interested. Much has been written about the philosophy of Dominic Cummings in this respect, but it was Michael Gove who elevated Cummings in the first place – and who is now sowing confusion and disinformation in the media as enthusiastically as anyone. The entire Conservative election platform hangs on the idea that Parliament and Whitehall are betraying ‘the people’ – that is, they are pursuing their own political agenda. In this view, everyone has already picked a side – and if you refuse to state your choice, you are marked as left-wing, probably a Remainer, and potentially disloyal to Britain.
The once separate domains marked ‘politics’ and ‘media’ have collapsed into each other. It is not incidental that the politicians leading the charge against fair reporting – Johnson and Gove – are both former journalists. They dwell in a space between politics and news, where everything becomes about performing for the camera, manipulating the frame and controlling the audience experience. Britain is used to having the majority of newspapers pitted against the Labour Party, and expects every Labour leader to come under disproportionate attack. But the combination of Brexit and Johnson has produced something altogether new: a sense that Downing Street is now a media agency, and Fleet Street a political one.
One of the cornerstones of liberal politics, dating back to the Enlightenment, is the idea of a ‘separation of powers’. This typically refers to the tripartite system of government, separating executive, legislature and judiciary, on which the US constitution was built. But liberalism depends on other varieties of separation, or at least the appearance of them. It assumes, for instance, that ‘the economy’ is relatively separate from ‘the state’. To most liberals, even the concentration of power in specific institutions – such as large corporations – is acceptable so long as that power is contested by rivals. What is fatal for liberalism, however, is the semblance of a single, undivided power bloc, or the emergence of one centre of power that dominates all others.
Without some distinction between rival centres of power, public decision-making cannot possibly be described as ‘fair’ or ‘independent’. Only if judges retain their distance from parliamentary politics, for example, can their judgements be perceived as disinterested. By the same token, the BBC can perform its role in providing an ‘impartial’ account of political events only if its distance from party politics is defended and respected. But a key tactic of the new conservatism is to mock the very idea of ‘fairness’, toying with it to the point where it becomes merely cosmetic – as when the Conservative Twitter account was briefly rebranded as factcheckUK.16
Johnson, Gove and Cummings are exploiting institutional decay, but they didn’t initiate it. Various ideological and technological forces have been undermining the conditions of liberal pluralism for some years. During the 1990s, a new orthodoxy developed among political scientists and sociologists that power now resided in networks, not institutions; for individuals, ‘networking’ became a crucial career skill. In place of professionalism (focused on a single domain of practice), a new ethos emerged to celebrate flexibility and self-reinvention – the ability to leap from job to job and sector to sector as the market demands.
The simultaneous rise of the internet broke down the vertical divisions – slowly at first, and then all at once – between different genres of culture and communication. Where once there were newspapers, broadcasts, magazines, drama and light entertainment, now there are platforms where a torrent of undifferentiated ‘content’ spills around. The political troll and the fake-news merchant exploit a simple truth – that it’s no longer possible to keep spaces marked ‘satire’ and ‘news’ away from each other. This new information ecosystem has given rise to a new type of public figure, who does not belong in any one of the old analogue domains, being at once an actor, a comedian, a politician and a media personality. Look no further than our prime minister.
Elites have always had means of congregating, be they Oxford University clubs or exclusive schools. But in the past these served as institutional escalators, providing rapid access to the heights of an establishment subdivided by professional specialism. In today’s power elite, figures such as George Osborne don’t expect to have to choose between a career in politics, finance or the media, but flit between them. We are witnessing a kind of ‘Berlusconification’ of public life, where the divisions between politics, media and business lose all credibility. Legitimacy crises of this sort are disastrous for public trust – but they offer tantalising opportunities to a handful of individuals willing to take advantage.
Brexit isn’t the cause of this slow collapse, so much as its most disruptive consequence. But it is also an accelerator. Brexit is what you believe in once you’ve come to see public life as a game played by insiders. And the reason you come to that conclusion is partly because it contains some truth. The more dubious government, party politics and the media appear, the more seductive Brexit grows, and the deeper Johnson’s support becomes. Downing Street understands this, which is why it is determined to make public life look as dubious as possible.
The Johnson Victory
After a chaotic and surreal campaign, there was a comforting familiarity about the rituals of election night. Tories will rehearse their favourite fairy-tale – that the ‘party of Thatcher’ has finally rediscovered its 1980s mojo – while Labour retreats to its own comfort zone of bitter internal feuding. But amid all this drama, there is a danger that we might forget how deeply abnormal the Conservative election campaign has been, and how frighteningly unfamiliar the impending government could be.
The winning campaign strategy was simple: to make this the second referendum, to make it as exhausting as possible, and to make sure Labour’s offer of yet another referendum looked more exhausting still. The Tories’ blank policy agenda – beyond passing the existing Brexit deal in January – was aimed directly at a group of voters who don’t trust politicians, don’t believe government can help them, and are done with listening to ‘liberal elites’ bickering over the precise number of hospitals the Tories will or won’t build. For today’s Conservatives, the collapse of trust in institutions isn’t a problem – it’s an opportunity. ‘Get Brexit Done’, like Donald Trump’s ‘build a wall’, was not a policy pledge so much as a mantra to identify with, for those who think the establishment is a stitch-up.
Two other ingredients were necessary. First, a right-wing ‘big tent’ needed constructing, one that spreads all the way from Matt Hancock in the centre-right out to Tommy Robinson on the far right. Johnson repeatedly did just enough to communicate to former Brexit Party voters that he was on their side. For the desperate men and women (but mostly men) living in the abandoned economic regions of the Midlands and the North, for whom only a Trump figure would be enough to draw them to the polls, Johnson performed that role adequately. For well-off elderly voters, who had been seduced by Faragist visions of national identity, Johnson’s dog-whistles hit home. Study his ‘apologies’ for past Islamophobic comments, and you’ll notice that they’re never apologies at all – they are affirmations of his right to say ‘what everyone is thinking’.
Second, Johnson’s media profile and contacts were leveraged to the hilt. By the end of the campaign, he was performing a kind of Jeremy Clarkson role – obliterating any democratic dialogue or interrogation by dressing up as a milkman or driving a forklift truck. ‘Boris’ began life as a construct of the Daily Telegraph and Have I Got News For You, but now exists as a genre of social media ‘content’. Unlike in the heyday of broadcast and print media, propaganda now has to be lively and engaging in order to work. And so the election was not won by an ordinary political party, with policies, members and ideology. It was won by a single-issue new-media start-up – you might call it Vote Boris – fronted by a TV star, which will now unveil a largely unknown policy agenda.
The 2016 referendum result and the ‘Boris’ phenomenon have created a Trojan Horse, within which lurks who knows what. But the chances of it offering anything transformative to the former Labour voters of Blyth Valley or Bolsover, beyond the occasional culture-war titbit, are minimal. One thing we do know is that the Vote Boris campaign was funded by hedge funds and wealthy British entrepreneurs – just as they donated heavily to Vote Leave. But who knows what they get in return? It also seems safe to assume, on the evidence of Johnson’s first few months in office, that his administration will be hostile to many basic norms of the constitution and the liberal public sphere. Meanwhile, a triumphant Dominic Cummings will have his eye on a drastic transformation of Whitehall and regulators, inspired by exotic forms of rationalism, game theory and the libertarian right.
If the new Johnson government sustains its unprecedented relationship with the media of the past six weeks – threatening public service broadcasters, excluding the Daily Mirror from its campaign bus, seamless coordination with the conservative press, using ‘Boris’ to distract from every unwelcome news item – then it will be virtually impossible for it to be held to account for what it does. And having already rebranded itself as the ‘people’s government’, there is no reason to expect it will embrace normal democratic scrutiny or opposition.
A combination of Brexit, decades of neglect and political alienation in Labour’s heartlands, the new digital media ecology, and hints of frightening illiberalism could conspire to produce a form of democracy that looks more like Hungary or even Russia than the checks-and-balances system of liberal ideals. It’s not that democracy will end, but that it will be reduced to a set of spectacles that the government is ultimately in command of, which everyone realises are ‘fake’ but that are sufficiently funny or soothing as to be tolerated.
This may sound paranoid, but it is merely an extrapolation from the trends that are already in full sway. Just like Trump, Johnson’s capacity to make headlines and change the subject means we can quickly forget how much damage he has already done, in less than six months – instead we are locked in a perpetual present, squabbling over the details of what he’s doing right now. It’s important to keep track. Challenging this juggernaut will be a far larger and more complex project than anything Her Majesty’s Opposition can do alone.