Tomorrow Will Be Better

There's an air of "something is rotten in the state" at the moment, and not just because the Tories failed coup against Boris Johnson has left him like a beached whale gently decomposing in the sun. Some of this is attributable to the government's lack of a coherent programme, though surely no one familiar with Johnson's time as London Mayor can really have believed that he was going to be the busy figurehead of an activist administration. Some can even be traced back to the foolhardiness of the way that Brexit was negotiated, but even this strikes me more as symptom than cause. In fact, the growing unease about British politics is clearly the reflection of a wider malaise that encompasses Keir Starmer's underwhelming impact despite a steady poll lead as much as Johnson's lazy and inept performance. I think the root of this is a crisis of confidence in the UK state that dates back to the 1970s but which has arguably worsened since 2008. While analyses like Tom Nairn's The Breakup of Britain are nowadays held to be insightful but at best premature, they conform to the standard historiography, whether that be conservative or Marxist, in focusing on the elite strata of the state. Insufficient attention has been paid to the popular narrative, despite the influence of Gramsci on British intellectuals.

The obvious exception to this was Grantham's most famous daughter, Margaret Thatcher. Though her prescription was reactionary, from planting flags on remote colonial outposts and sympathy for our "kith and kin" in Apartheid South Africa, to crushing the unions and hamstringing local government "at home", she unquestionably addressed the spectre of decline head on, even if many would argue that the "decline" diagnosed in the 1970s was a misrepresentation of postwar history. What she (or, perhaps more accurately, the economic recovery of the late-80s) did engender was a renewed confidence in both personal and social advance, though she remained ideologically focused on the former and hostile to the latter. Much of the social development of recent decades has been attributed to the 1990s as a period when a tired Conservative government found itself out-of-step with society, but this underplays the extent to which trends such as the increasing tolerance of sexual and gender diversity and the increasing intolerance of racism at a popular level have their roots in the disruption of the late-70s and early-80s. Jerry Dammers, not John Lydon, was the true cultural harbinger.

There's an obvious contradiction between the promise of a better tomorrow - the "British dream", as some politicians have ill-advisedly described it - and the UK's historic trajectory, not just since 2008 but arguably since 1945. While the optimism of the late-80s felt like a return to normal (fuelling another boom in 60s nostalgia), the ensuing recession suggested that the "great moderation" was more apparent than real, a feeling that would be confirmed by the increase in financial crises globally around the millennium, culminating in the crash of 2008. The victory of New Labour in 1997 was driven by many factors but a crucial one was the popular appetite for change and the sense of optimism this entailed. The hangover, seen most clearly in declining turnout in elections, was intense. In key ways the Blair and Brown administrations followed the template of Attlee's 1945 government. While Sure Start is hardly a monument comparable to the NHS, it was consistent in its top-down, officious social democracy. But the real parallel I want to draw with Labour's most famous "reforming" government is that it enacted little actual reform at the meta-level of the state, particularly in terms of democracy.

The opportunities spurned by Attlee were legion, from reform of the House of Lords to workers' control (the management of the NCB was literally the old management of private industry, which inevitably led to conflict despite the initial spirit of cooperation exhibited by the NUM). Though the thumbnail history emphasises the independence of India, the postwar government was actually fully determined to hang on to empire for as along as it could, even if this was for cynical economic reasons (dollar exports) rather than the nostalgic imperialism of Churchill. Likewise, the 1997-2010 years witnessed a failure to properly address the City of London and the housing market. The expansion of further education omitted to address the entrenched privileges of elite universities, while the increased investment in the NHS and other public services saw much of it creamed-off by the private sector due to the failure to reverse marketisation. Blair and Brown proved effective administrators of the state but they were never in the business of reforming it, beyond what were intended to be essentially cosmetic gestures around devolution and the Lords. 

The failure of the progressive party to actually progress at the level of the state has led to a strange inversion in recent years whereby it is nominal conservatives who demand root-and-branch reform. While some of this is simply the anti-state rhetoric normalised by Thatcher, predicated on a "rollback" to some earlier Eden, some goes beyond this style to envisage radical departures from the historical course, the most obvious example being Brexit. While the denouement suggests a lack of real thought about what was desired, it would be wrong to attribute the current mess to Tory incompetence alone. There is clearly a popular, if not overwhelming, appetite for change in the social and economic order (witness the optimism of 2017) and one that sees the state, rather than the market or organised labour, as the means by which this can be effected. The very idea of progress has become sufficiently hegemonic, if only as an aesthetic preference, that Tories now compete with contemporary "radicals" as agents of change, from levelling-up to threats against the conservative forces of the judiciary. The absorption of RCP cadres by the Conservative press is an example of this - less Furedi et al's ideological opportunism than a recognition that the polarity has switched: the Conservatives are expected to reform; Labour is expected to preserve.

That the Labour Party has moved to the right of the Tories on some issues is not simply a reflection of the current leadership's innate conservatism and disdain for popular activism, it also points to the necessity of the "other party" adjusting to ensure that the political locus remains in the centre (i.e. centre-right). The more the Tories shift to the left, even if only in rhetoric, the greater the pressure on Labour not to shift further left but to move rightwards and maintain a balance, again if only in rhetoric. But regardless of which party plays which role, there is an expectation that the combination will produce steady, incremental change without major disruption to the establishment. This doesn't ignore the popular appetite for change but instead assumes that a mix of soundbites and spectacle will satisfy it so long as the economy is working well enough for the majority. The limits of this were visible in the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, which suggested a degree of respect for the sphinx-like monarch but less than fervent enthusiasm for the monarchy. Similarly, the liberal commentariat's fascination with tweaks to the upper chamber of Parliament or the political cast-list fails to chime with the wider public. 

The contemporary problem is that while we have seen a rapid growth in circuses over the last two decades people are increasingly struggling for bread, and if there's one lesson that commentators have taken from the 1970s it is that material deprivation - wages falling behind inflation - can create a revolutionary atmosphere. Ironically, what the era actually produced was a counter-revolution, in large part because people didn't lack for bread, either in the 70s or the 80s: Thatcher famously oversaw an explosion in state benefits that was barely reversed by her successors (both Conservative and Labour) until the introduction of austerity and Universal Credit under David Cameron. The growth in foodbanks and the exacerbating factors of precarious employment and the gig economy are relatively recent phenomena in historical terms, and consequently the situation we find ourselves now in can legitimately be termed unprecedented, particularly if the forecasts on inflation (high) and wage growth (low) prove accurate. Whether this will produce a revolutionary situation is impossible to tell, but it's obvious that without suitable fall-guys (note the persistence of Jeremy Corbyn in the imaginations of many commentators), popular anger will inevitably be directed towards the actual establishment and the rich, rather than the media fiction of the "enemies of the people".

In the 1970s, the establishment directed popular anger towards the public sector while preserving the state itself and reaffirming the interests of capital. This time round there is less confidence that the trick can be pulled off again, not simply because of the battered state of our public services but because the supposed vested interests - union "barons" and feather-bedded civil servants then, Islington lawyers and student unions now - are comically out of proportion (the RMT's threat of strike action has been a god-send to the press, allowing them to disinter some of their favourite tropes, but that union's exceptional circumstances are all-too obvious). It is this that constitutes the crisis of confidence. The contemporary state is a paper tiger that could collapse under the slightest pressure. For all the trumpeting of the achievements of the vaccine taskforce and the foregrounding of senior civil servants like Chris Whitty, we all know that the pandemic was negotiated through popular initiative and responsibility, hence the dismay over the inequitable treatment of breaches. The farce of "partygate" has not simply revealed the entitlement and arrogance at the heart of government, it has reinforced the impression that the establishment is incapable of defending itself any longer. An open goal for Sir Keir Starmer QC? Cometh the hour; cometh the establishment's man.