‘Not my King’ was a loud shout of protest on the streets during the recent coronation. Inside the Abbey, the presence of a stream of admiring recent Prime Ministers evoked a rather different reaction from me. I certainly don’t want to be ruled by a constitutional monarchy that embeds, legitimates and naturalises inequalities on a grand scale.
But nor do I want to be governed by the collection of fantasists and failures who currently represent themselves as the government of the UK.
In the face of proliferating national and international crises, it feels odd to watch the surrender of any pretence of governing in the public interest, or even of competent governance. Instead, we have become accustomed to promises being made with rhetorical fervour and then immediately forgotten, broken or simply passed over in favour of the next smart phrase.
Wherever I look, the legacy of this government (and the accumulated effects of its predecessors) looks like failure. The failure to take the climate catastrophe seriously is matched by the failure to manage a deepening cost of living crisis. Then, there’s the failure to fund and maintain critical public services: water supply and treatment, health, education, social care, transport and housing. In each case the costs are borne by the users of those services (at least those who cannot afford to head for privatised alternatives) and the people who work in those services (as symbolised in the continuing wave of strikes). The most recent Prime Minister’s five pledges (made in January of this year) were, by mid-May, proving ‘difficult’ to deliver (according to Energy Minister, Grant Shapps). And that leaves aside all those difficult things for which no pledges were made…
Despite my frustrations, this list of failures takes a too narrow and short-term view of the problems of being governed in the UK. It’s useful to think beyond the immediate events of party politics and locate current failures in the longer-term mix of political, cultural and economic shifts that date back to the late 1970s. The still-dominant ways of thinking of how to govern were set in place then, in the moment of ‘Thatcherism’. That term was coined by Stuart Hall to summarise the distinctive combination of nationalist and populist political strategies, neoliberal economic approaches (not least in the ‘Big Bang’ that liberated global financial capital), and the profound social authoritarianism that sought to repress forms of dissent from trade union activism to gay politics.
Hall also referred to this as ‘authoritarian populism’ – and the UK has spent the following 40 years being subjected to variations on these themes, sometimes with a social democratic veneer, at other times in hot pursuit of ‘hostile environments’. But throughout this long conjuncture, varieties of nationalism and populism have provided the dominant political frame. Equally, the neoliberal mantra of liberating enterprise – with its fellow travellers of anti-welfarism and antisocial individualism – have rarely been challenged, much less displaced. There are moments of resistance – on the streets, in some media and even on the beaches (a recent sand drawing at the North Yorkshire seaside proclaimed ‘CEOs get rich, we get sick’). However, the coercive reach of the state has been consistently extended, finding new target populations to control and confine. The current authoritarian waves (attempting to suppress protest, along with closing our borders) are the same tunes in new legal forms and the old populist register: the People must be celebrated and defended.
The decade of austerity, itself generated by the need to save capitalism from itself (too big to fail?), laid the groundwork for more failures but did not change the playbook. So, we have recently been subjected to a variety of Margaret Thatcher tribute acts as the Conservative Party fails to think again. ‘Capitalist realism’ has been consistently combined with the endless pursuit of ‘growth’ and the straitjacket of ‘fiscal realism’ as the confining frame for thinking about the future possibilities of economic and social development. Meanwhile, nationalism and authoritarianism transcend party differences, reducing political arguments to the quest for the most efficient way to close our borders, or to different versions of who most deserves the full weight of the law to be their fate. The 40-year enclosure of our collective future continues as alternative possibilities are trashed, discarded or simply dismissed as ‘unrealistic’.
So, ‘Not my government’, please. And certainly not one that includes a Home Secretary who thinks that the resolution to a long (colonial) history of dependence on migrant labour is to ‘train up’ British folk to be lorry drivers, butchers and fruit pickers. This is a vision that takes no account of history, of the time that training might take, or indeed of labour market dynamics. But it certainly appeals to some of its desired audience in terms of its brutal simplicity (a distinctive Braverman trait). Was I the only one to hear the Marie Antoinette echo? ‘Let them pick fruit’, indeed.
But ‘Not my government’ should be accompanied by ‘Not this way of thinking’: we desperately need to shed the straitjacket that combines authoritarian populism and the neoliberal imaginary to deliver failure piled on failure. Let us out…
John Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, The Open University, UK.
The Battle for Britain by John Clarke is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £24.99 (Currently £12.49 in our summer sale.)
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