Beyond the Pale

Foreign policy enjoys an unusual role in the process of political legitimation in the UK. This is quite unlike other Western countries where it tends to be much more marginal in the discourse and its electoral impact is often negligible. We're all familiar with the risks that a British politician takes when they criticise Israel's behaviour in the West Bank or Gaza, or the difficulty in addressing the reality of the United States' sprawling empire of military outposts and wholly-owned subsidiary governments. In contrast, consider how inconsequential the charges laid against both Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen over their supposed support of Russia were in the recent French elections. You could put this down to the prominence of domestic concerns, or even the longstanding tendency of the French to see Russia as a necessary alternative pole to the US, but in either case what it highlights is the mistake of Macron and his advisers in imagining that fealty to NATO would be a vote-winner. It's almost as if they adopted a British script and were nonplussed when it bombed. 

The British centrist turn against Mick Lynch for having an opinion on Ukraine is the most recent example of this process in action, but it's also one that suggests that the manoeuvre may be losing its power, despite the best efforts of the media to smear him as a Putin apologist, an idiot Lexiteer and even the sort of guy who would share a platform with Gerry Adams. It has certainly been amusing to see centrists tell him to "stay in your lane" while also insisting that his (from their perspective) eccentric views are why we shouldn't take him seriously in any context, as if having a nuanced take on recent Ukrainian history was a disqualification for leading a nationwide strike over pay and jobs in the UK rail industry. The glee with which certain centrist commentators fastened onto his words ("I just knew he would turn out to be dodgy" etc) isn't remotely surprising, but it is still worth noting their assumption that not being "sound" on foreign policy is enough to make you a political pariah.

This is odd because historically foreign policy was always highly contested in British politics, most obviously during the nineteenth century when it was central to public debate and even dominated general elections. Gladstone's famous "Midlothian campaign", which led up to the 1880 defeat of Disraeli's Conservative government, ranged over the Eastern Question (notably the "Bulgarian Horrors" ), the Second Anglo-Afghan War and the Zulu War. What was notable about this was that the Liberals considered foreign policy a legitimate point of difference and the electorate sufficiently sophisticated to care enough about it to vote accordingly. This was a period of restricted franchise (only 3 million voters in 1880), but it was also a period when the urban working class (or at least the older, male members of it who were householders) were increasingly pivotal to election outcomes following the 1867 Reform Act. While much of the debate can be seen in hindsight as the clash of interests that profited in different ways from empire, it was also very much concerned with what we would today call humanitarian issues, even wokeness.

The idea that major differences over foreign policy were legitimate continued into the twentieth century, first and foremost over the vexed issue of Ireland. The interwar period saw major differences of opinion over Europe (notably appeasement) and empire (notably Indian independence), not all of which neatly cleaved to party political lines. The change in attitude to one in which deviation from an official, monolithic orthodoxy was considered unacceptable could arguably be attributed to the post-1945 Atlanticist hegemony, except that this ignores the bitter salience of Suez in 1956, the Vietnam War in the 1960s (consider Harold Wilson's delicate manoeuvring to avoid entanglement), and the coup in Chile in 1973 (which led to strikes in solidarity in the UK). The idea that anything less than full-throated support for NATO, the US and Israel puts you beyond the pale (a phrase with its own imperial resonance) is a relatively recent development whose roots probably lie in the mid-1980s. 

It is forgotten now but Michael Foot's thunderous denunciation of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982 was consistent with the Labour left's opposition to Pinochet. But the point was quickly lost in the jingoistic clamour that equated the "enemy without" with the "enemy within". This reached a crescendo during the miners' strike two years later, but it's also worth recalling how this frame was extended by the media to the idea that scepticism about the value of nuclear weapons - and specifically Labour's commitment to unilateral disarmament - was tantamount to treason. The "Would you push the button?" question had been a staple press gotcha throughout the Cold War, but after 1989, once the probability that a politician would ever face the dilemma receded, it became less an agonising question of existential responsibility and more the table-stakes of "responsible" politics. No "serious" politician in the 1990s would suggest that pushing the button was an admission of insanity, and likewise no serious politician questioned the Washington Consensus.

The contemporary tragedy-in-the-making is the blithe assurance of British commentators, like Simon Tisdall (writing in a newspaper that once took a principled stand over Suez), that NATO would wipe the floor with Russia in a conventional war ("A convincing display of Pentagon-style “shock and awe”, just as Putin was anticipating quick, easy victory, could have stopped the entire invasion in its tracks"). Even worse is the belief that if Putin resorted to battlefield nuclear weapons he would be boosting the West ("Might such a taboo-breaking atrocity result in Ukraine joining Nato"), as if the loss in life were merely a matter of geopolitical calculation to be milked for all its worth (echoes here of the "Bulgarian Horrors", which only goes to show that liberals remain among the most blood-thirsty of political "realists"). Tisdall's contentions might well be true, but is the liberation of Crimea really worth the risk of finding out? Clearly, no Western political leaders actually think so or they would have acted on it before now, even if they are prepared to rattle sabres for domestic consumption or indulge in nuclear threat theatre (with Donald Trump a useful proxy). 

This last point - the gap between actual foreign policy and the hyperbole of the press - provides an explanation for how the change in attitude came about. The Overton Window on foreign policy hasn't shifted all that much over the last 40 years, and where it has shifted it has generally done so in a progressive direction: that Israel can be labelled an Apartheid state is not insignificant, despite the attempts to demonise those who use the term. But the window has also noticeably narrowed. For example, there is no non-aligned movement any more - you are either lined up with the West or you are being seduced by China - and the idea that there are varieties of capitalism has gone the way of the idea that there are varieties of socialism. Meanwhile, we have grown used to the idea that there are certain states, like Cuba and Iran, whose natural condition is to be under punitive economic sanctions: that entire generations have been born and come to maturity knowing no other circumstances.

In this context, I was interested to read the latest William Davies piece in the Guardian. His topic is the lack of ideas in British politics. This isn't a particularly novel observation, though he does the useful service of noting that the similarities between Starmer, Sunak and Truss go well beyond an uncomfortable presentation style to a deeper anti-intellectualism. Where I think he is wrong (or has bent too far to meet editorial prejudice) is in the suggestion that this is a very recent development, tracing the inflexion point to the EU referendum in 2016. Thus he can claim that "As leaders, David Cameron and Ed Miliband both sought to revive their parties’ credibility by seeking the advice and endorsement of policy gurus", as if Cameron's revival of 1930s economic husbandry and Miliband's tentative steps towards 1950s-style social democracy ("predistribution") were evidence of a healthy intellectual climate pre-Brexit.

The key passage, which surveys the intellectual currents from the prewar years to the 90s, is this: "For Keynes, the purpose was to overturn the outdated shibboleths of laissez-faire economics, which had led to the disaster of the 1930s; for Thatcherites, it was specifically to replace the Keynesian regime that was put in place after 1945. But even in the absence of such policy radicalism, ideas have been important. New Labour was awash with often nerdish narratives about the “knowledge economy”, “globalisation” and “the network society”." You'll notice that the passage moves from serious intellectual traditions to what amounts to little more than a set of buzzwords. For a sociologist, it is notable that Davies ignores the then-voguish communitarianism of the 90s and the ultimately fruitless attempts at a more serious philosophical engagement by the likes of Giddens and Habermas. The truth is that British politics was denuded of ideas in the mid-90s, not six years ago, and one result of that is the delusion among centrists that Tony Blair is still at the cutting-edge of political thought.

Blair's legacy was always going to be contested, despite the fact that so little of it tangibly remains, not so much because of disputes over what did or did not work but because of its relentless focus on closing down the possibility of alternatives, to the point of revelling in powerlessness ("You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer"). It was a deeply ideological project and central to it was the belief that there should be little latitude in opinion. The Blairite antipathy towards Ed Miliband as much as Jeremy Corbyn is evidence of this deep hatred of deviation. The extreme message-management of the era was the essence of Blairism, not simply a by-product of Alastair Campbell's personality. This was more pronounced in foreign than domestic policy. The latter was always going to be subject to inconvenient facts (the "lifeworld"), but the former would be helpfully reduced to a binary division of the world into friend and foe by the media. The consequence is today's contempt for independent thought and the insistence that foreign policy should be a catechism rather than a contest.