Afterword:
In the Wreckage of Liberalism

Within two months of the 2019 general election, Boris Johnson had delivered on the one substantial policy pledge of his triumphant electoral campaign: on 31 January 2020, Britain exited the European Union. This produced the unusual and uneasy state of affairs whereby a new prime minister with a sizeable majority had close to five years of power ahead of him, with precious little public knowledge of what he intended to use it for. Considerable uncertainty hovered around Johnson’s domestic agenda and his own political vision, which appeared to change depending on what was the easiest or most entertaining line to take from one moment to the next. In the event, Johnson enjoyed the shortest of honeymoons before an even bigger crisis than Brexit appeared in March 2020. Things were about to get a lot less normal.

Once the scale and implications of the COVID-19 pandemic had become clear, the tone of the Johnson leadership became dramatically different. The bluster, recklessness, humour and optimism which his supporters adored were suddenly absent. At the very historical juncture when Britain had witnessed a popular revenge against unelected technocrats and liberal institutions, an emergency arrived that placed huge public demands on scientists and administrators, throwing statistics into the media spotlight for weeks on end. Following months in which Johnson and his supporters had turned politics into a festival of flag-waving, trolling, rule-breaking and mendacity, there was now an urgent need to focus on verifiable facts and communicate as precisely as possible. Daily press conferences were established, at which Johnson or a cabinet colleague would stand flanked by scientific advisors.

As March turned into April, and Britain’s death toll mounted, the era of ‘fake news’ and divisive cultural battles seemed to have receded into the distant past. In the depths of the crisis, with a full lockdown under way, some observers wondered whether a government of ‘national unity’ would have to be established. Johnson’s populist targeting of independent institutions, such as the BBC, supreme court, Whitehall and universities, was put on hold. It appeared that, amidst the turmoil, liberal elites had won a reprieve.

But within little more than a month, the pendulum was swinging back again. Following the prime minister’s hospitalisation with COVID-19, his cheerleaders in the press went into overdrive in celebrating his persona as a national hero. A new wave of national iconography began to swell, of flags, World War Two songs, royalty and appeals to collective sacrifice. The National Health Service was conscripted as part of this glorious national effort, evidence of a uniquely British spirit of resilience and optimism. Hiding behind all this rhetoric and symbolism was the worst mortality rate in Europe, concentrated among deprived inner city communities, especially ethnic minorities. The constant rhetorical emphasis on ‘our NHS’ disguised the fact that nearly half of deaths were occurring in care homes, outside of the government’s official statistics, and to where elderly people were being rapidly transferred from hospitals, potentially bringing infections with them.

A crisis that initially appeared to have transcended cultural and political divides was soon being exploited to fend off criticism of Johnson’s leadership. Stories emerged of particular journalists being barred from asking questions at press conferences. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, accused Labour MP and medic Rosena Allin-Khan of adopting the wrong ‘tone’, when she challenged the government’s failure in testing for the virus.

Above all, Johnson’s support from the conservative press became deafening, and the ‘Boris’ character was mobilised to hide the facts of vast and fatal policy failures. The stream of inconvenient statistics and research findings were spun and disguised wherever possible, with one official report on mortality rates being delayed to hide its findings on the disproportionate threat to ethnic minorities. At every turn, the expectation was that the government should be the recipient of national solidarity, while their opponents were simply sowing division and pessimism. The unwinding of the daily press conferences was initially justified on the eminently Trumpian grounds that they did not attract sufficient ‘ratings’.

As Johnson and his government slowly recovered from the depths of April 2020, the attacks on independent institutions picked up all over again. The status of Johnson’s strategist Dominic Cummings was cast into a whole new light, following the scandal that erupted from the discovery that he had repeatedly ignored the government’s rules of lockdown. Not only was Cummings entirely unrepentant, but – in supporting him so slavishly – it became palpably obvious that Downing Street had no respect for erstwhile norms of public life. This may have been no surprise to anyone who had closely followed the Brexit campaign (led by Cummings) or the Johnson leadership, but in the context of such terrible national stress, it felt as if the entire country was being trolled by a joker figure.

As more and more policy failures came to light (with one former scientific advisor estimating that the delay in the March lockdown had led to twice as many deaths by June), the Johnson government renewed its efforts to initiate culture wars, as a shroud over the social and personal catastrophes that were unfolding. Conservative politicians launched into arguments over historic statues, war memorials, trans rights and criminal justice in an effort to change the topic and discredit their critics.

And yet by summer 2020, with public trust in government’s handling of the crisis plummeting (especially in the honesty of their information), the scale of the social, economic and racial crises across British – and especially English – society was more than government propaganda could hide.¹ As Johnson and his band of Brexiteers set about attacking the institutions of the liberal establishment, they themselves had precious few alternative grounds for legitimacy, beyond the best efforts of a desperately struggling print media industry.

In the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the accompanying reckoning of historic institutions and wealth, brought an extraordinary flowering of political expression and criticism. Surreally, in the context of an ongoing lockdown of much of the economy and public space, new protest movements filled the void, where previously there were the rigours and routines of everyday capitalist society. Amid the stress of the pandemic, there were glimpses of alternative futures – less beholden to tradition, work, consumption and long-distance travel. One survey showed that the vast majority of people did not want to return to ‘normal’ patterns of life, once the crisis had finally passed.² The key pillars of liberal capitalism were questionable and questioned like never before, not just in terms of their past (which could now be publicly explored in relation to colonialism and slavery), but in terms of their future, which seemed less certain than they had for decades. The breaking of normality also represents liberation.

Nevertheless, in spite of these crises, failures and fresh hopes, the power of the post-Brexit Conservative regime remains fearsome. Its vision had already been hinted at over the previous years, as mapped in this book: much tighter national borders, attacks on universities and other centres of international intellectualism, weakening of checks on executive power (such as the independent civil service and judiciary), and intimidation of public service media such as the BBC and Channel 4, all combined with an ‘unleashing’ of the rights of capital. The economic and cultural opportunity of the COVID-19 crisis, from the perspective of the self-described ‘post-liberals’ on the right, is to push Britain away from the cosmopolitanism and openness that had been a general tendency since the 1960s, back towards a society of fewer university graduates, lower levels of migration and greater economic nationalism.

This potentially coincides with a cybernetic fantasy (popular with Cummings and his former patron, Michael Gove) of data-led policy-making, which in practice means shifting decision-making into opaque centres of commercial analytics contractors. The industry that benefited the most from the pandemic was that of digital platform monopolies. In late April 2020, one fifth of the value of the American S&P 500 was in just five companies: Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet (which owns Google), Apple and Microsoft. No matter how markets and society would be revived, much of it would be channelled via these apparently indomitable private powers. In spite of the brief hiatus, when public expertise and policy competence experienced a resurgence of enthusiasm from the Johnson government, the longer term effect of the pandemic looks likely to be a hastening of the collapse of British liberalism.

These forces leave the left in a similar bind as the Brexit split had done over the previous four years, only now without the galvanising force of the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party that connected Westminster to more radical forces on the left. In the face of conservative and nationalist attacks on the liberal establishment, many on the left feel ambivalent. The shortcomings and occlusions of government administration, technocratic policy-making, scientific positivism, constitutionalism, liberal economics and public service broadcasting have all been subjected to sustained critique, from a range of Marxist and non-Marxist positions.

And yet these remain potential checks on a form of executive power that seems intent on reinstating traditional cultural hierarchies, in alliance with particular business interests – the form of ‘neo-illiberalism’ that has already been identified in the United States, Hungary and Brazil.³ History suggests that liberal institutions alone are not enough to prevent the rise of nationalism, and may often be complicit with it; but it also suggests that the worst varieties of right-wing regime begin by targeting independent agencies and individuals, who can be charged with disloyalty or allegiance to international networks. For these reasons, the collapse of liberalism in the present context is cause for grave political concern.

In truth, this ambivalence is as old as socialism itself. Ever since the French Revolution, the starting point of socialist critique and organisation is that liberal freedoms are necessary but not sufficient. Freedom in the political realm is a mere abstraction, unless it is matched by freedom in the economic realm. The left has highlighted the fact that the bourgeois public sphere only admits property-owners as equals; and yet it has also exploited the freedoms of the public sphere to advance its arguments and interests, and is hostile to political efforts to constrain such liberties. Critical theorists in the Frankfurt School tradition have often sought to walk this dialectical path, of harnessing the methodologies and intellectual freedoms of bourgeois society to challenge, unmask and weaken the power of liberal capitalism.

In the context of neoliberalism, and especially in the wake of September 11, the left has found itself defending the norms and institutions of liberalism, often with little acknowledgement from the liberal establishment itself. As neoliberal reforms have sought to elevate financial mechanisms and metrics above legal ones, the defence of rights and due process has frequently become an anti-capitalist one. See, for instance, how liberal norms around privacy are an essential tool of resistance to the mission creep of ‘surveillance capital’.

And as neoconservatives have sought to elevate executive decisions above legal and judicial authority, it has frequently been those on the left who are found deploying liberal–legal arguments against the state. On issues such as deportations, legal aid, detention without trial and ‘extraordinary rendition’, it has repeatedly been the left (and not the neoliberal centre) that has done the job of defending the rule of law and judicial process. Whenever legislation has entered Parliament seeking to empower the executive at the expense of civil liberties, it has been socialists in the Labour Party that have voted against.

Liberal ideals, of constitutional process and the ‘separation of powers’, have played a fundamental role in legitimating and sustaining capitalism since the eighteenth century, which renders them suspicious in the eyes of the left. But two additional things are worth noting. Firstly, it’s no longer clear that contemporary capitalism has need of a norm-based, legal model of the state, indeed platform capitalism prospers by defying it. Companies such as Facebook and Google thrive by attacking existing norms around ownership and privacy; code acquires the sovereignty once reserved for law. This is where the ‘disruptors’ of Silicon Valley find a common cause with those of the new conservative insurgency.

Moreover, there is much to gain from diverting liberal ideals (of restraint on executive power) towards democratic socialism, and against the overbearing power of contemporary capital. As the liberal–legal state is dismantled, it is not the left that will be the beneficiary, but new combinations of the nationalist right and monopoly capital. The task, as Katharina Pistor has argued, is to seize the legal tools that enshrine the rights of capital, and divert them to alternative forms of economic ownership and control.⁴

The Deleuzian ‘control society’, now perfected by the Wall Street–Silicon Valley alliance, is one that attacks all forms of institutional differentiation. It replaces separate spaces of ‘enclosure’ with a ‘continuous network’, where everything is constantly connected to everything else. Leisure, work, education, healthcare and intimacy all blend into one, producing an exhausted individual who lacks any downtime or breaks. This is what the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated. Here too, resistance often takes an implicitly liberal form: it is precisely the right of people to have separate spheres of life (public/private, political/economic, work/leisure) that, in their occasional naivety, liberals have sought to defend. For Marx, the length of the working day was the frontline of the battle between capital and labour.

Today it is the very possibility of a temporally differentiated life, and an institutionally differentiated society, that is at stake. This is why occupations and picket lines are both disruptive and constructive, seeing as they gesture towards the possibility of life lived in multiple modes, in multiple times and places. The recent collapse of ‘work’, ‘home’ and ‘family’ into a single confined space, deprived of a public, was provoked by the coronavirus, but there are numerous political and economic forces which seek to exploit and prolong it. To date, it has been women whose freedom has been most curtailed by this enforced domesticity.

Neoliberalism has grown increasingly illiberal since 2008, producing new mutations of nationalism and deregulation.⁵ The main beneficiaries of this are the crony capitalists and political insiders who leach off the patrimonial state.⁶ These include the financial and digital ‘innovators’, who are looking for regulations and legal oversight to be weakened or tweaked to suit their business interests, and who find plenty of supporters in the post-liberal state.

The politically fatal dimension of neoliberalism, since its intellectual inception in the 1930s, has been its refusal to distinguish between a ‘political’ and an ‘economic’ realm. Government becomes a branch of business; business becomes a mode of governance. Who cares what’s public and what’s private? But as liberal institutions gradually decay, this eventually results in a situation of rampant clientelism, in which centres of power and of money collapse into a single undifferentiated elite. This is an outcome that would work equally well for Boris Johnson, the City of London and Silicon Valley, and would be applauded by Rupert Murdoch’s papers and broadcasters all the way.

The graver threat is of fascism, which seeks to abolish both the economic rights won by socialists, and the legal– constitutional ones established by liberals. The optimistic Marxist view of history, whereby each stage of economic development contains the seeds of its own destruction and superior replacement, runs into a violent obstacle where fascists are intent on stripping capitalism of all remnants of political modernity. The enemies of contemporary fascism are well known: socialists, feminists, critical theorists, plus of course the ethnic and cultural groups perceived to be controlling the global economy and ‘replacing’ white majorities. In wedding capitalism to metaphysical political visions of antiquity – of fatherhood, heroic violence, a bloodline and so on – the fascist takes aim indiscriminately at all emancipatory modern programmes. The question, then, is whether such programmes can forge alliances in time to resist.

If what’s left of the liberal centre does not find a way of identifying common ground with the left, it will be welcomed in by the nationalist right. This is well underway in many democracies around the world. It seems too often that, while the left is willing to defend key liberal planks of political modernity such as human rights and attention to facts, this is not reciprocated with support for economic democracy and wholesale redistribution of wealth and income. The crisis ushered in by coronavirus has accelerated the need to find this common ground between the defenders of institutional norms and those who agitate for economic justice. Long-standing liberal–socialist ideals, such as universal basic income, have acquired unprecedented plausibility in the context of the global pandemic. If this moment is to be seized by something other than nationalism or a type of privatised platform technocracy, a coalition of legal and economic rebuilders will be needed.