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Break up of Britain conference: Confronting the UK’s democratic crisis [1]
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Date: 2023-10
The establishment is a little elated. Even with the Conservatives unlikley to win the next election, the show is, it believes, set to remain firmly on the road. Jeremy Corbyn’s been kiboshed. Nicola Sturgeon’s stymied. A slew of MPs who have provided genuine opposition – Caroline Lucas, Mhari Black, Margaret Beckett – are standing down. Keir Starmer’s taken Labour by the throat and dragged it back to the right. Anti-protest and anti-union laws have made resistance increasingly difficult. Normality, as the establishment sees it, has returned; the waves of anti-system energy that have rocked the UK since 2008 have, it seems to think, dissipated.
But voters, or at least the few hundred I’ve interviewed this year, appear less thrilled. In 20 years of discussing politics with strangers in streets across the UK, Europe and the world, I’ve become used to cynicism and frustration. But in Uxbridge and Rutherglen, both of which have had by-elections in recent months, and Teesside and Newcastle, I witnessed a subtly different mood this summer. There was a definite whiff of despair in the air.
Some of this comes from what is euphemistically called ‘the cost of living crisis’ but is more accurately understood as the UK getting poorer. As with all major phenomena, our leaders have tried to depoliticise it, to make out that it’s caused by global and technocratic factors that they can’t control. They are rarely asked why the UK is forecast to have higher rates of inflation than any other G7 country this year and next.
Much of the doom I’ve seen across the UK has come from the sense that no one is offering any credible hope. No leader with any real chance of power is presenting a plan whose magnitude seems to match the size of the problems we face. For those on the right, the promise of Brexit is bust. For the left, Corbynism is over. Returning to their preferred self-obsessions, Westminster and its media entourage are looking the other way while Britain burns.
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One thinker who can help us put the current crisis in its longer historical context is the writer Tom Nairn, who died in January at the age of 90. In his 1977 book, ‘The Break Up of Britain’, Nairn wrote about the permacrisis as part of Britain’s sharp decline from its former place as the world’s biggest empire.
In other European countries, he argued, the arrival of capitalism saw the growth of middle classes, which then had revolutions to overthrow despotic, feudal and medieval states. But in Britain, capitalism allowed the ruling class, sufficiently bolstered by the empire, to buy off its bourgeoisie, bending the state to each passing age but, uniquely, never truly replacing it with one fit for modernity.
The result, he suggested, was that since a brief pre-eminence during the mid-19th century, British capitalism has been a laggard in the Western world, its sclerotic state incapable of guiding it in any direction but down.
Fifty years on, it’s easy to see what he meant. HS2 has been scrapped. Hinkley Point is two years late, more than 50% over budget and pointedly not here. The British state seems incapable of delivering the infrastructure capitalism demands. Even bards of Britishness, like Rory Stewart, have started to accept that the state is in a state.
Similarly, Nairn warned that empire and English early capitalism had produced a particular kind of nationalism. Where many other countries’ senses of self are rooted in notions of revolution and ideas of popular will, these all emerged in reaction to the arrival of capitalist modernity from England.
Anglo-Britain, as the force that all other modern nationalisms were revolting against, is different and comes with a conjoined elitism, a sense that a certain class ought to be in charge. Labour spent the summer preparing for power by genuflecting to that elite, with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves scrapping plans for taxes on the rich and Keir Starmer writing for The Sun about his plans to curb “mass” immigration.
But doing so comes with risks. Anglo-British nationalism isn’t all-pervasive, and is weak outside the English core. Though opposition to immigration in the UK is lower than it’s been for years, 42% still want less of it, vs just 22% who want more. Yet in Scotland, according to the first major poll on the question in nearly ten years, just 28% want less, vs 38% who want more. As Starmer rushes towards Tory voters in England, he runs away from middle Scotland.
While that isn’t likely to cost Starmer the general election, it’s brewing up tensions for his future regime. For years, Scottish Labour has told voters that Scotland doesn’t need independence to meet their centre-left aspirations, it just needs a Labour government in Westminster. If the party in London is no longer offering to meet those aspirations – or make any serious changes to the British state – then the constitutional crisis of the past decade is going nowhere.
And that means we need to talk. At openDemocracy, we are big fans of the written form – of discussing ideas and revealing new facts about the world. But sometimes, you need to get together in person and draw energy and ideas from each other, to help us all navigate the path ahead.
On 18 November, partly to mark the life and death of Tom Nairn, but also because this is a moment that requires serious thinking, a group of us is organising a big get-together in Edinburgh. Called ‘The Break up of Britain?,’ we’ll be confronting the UK’s democratic crisis. Caroline Lucas, Moya Lothian-McLean, Leanne Wood, Jamie Driscoll, Neal Ascherson and Clive Lewis will all be there. You can book your tickets here.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/break-up-of-britain-conference-edinburgh-18-november-uk-election-starmer-clive-lewis/
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