Britain Is Becoming America in All the Worst Ways
British politicians used to condescend to their U.S.
counterparts. During the pandemic, they've started copying their most
destructive habits.
BY ANDREW
BROWN | JULY 6, 2020, 4:25 AM
Are
Britain’s Conservatives taking a Republican turn? In the last week, two strange
speeches, a resignation, and a think tank report have all suggested that Boris
Johnson’s government is hoping to escape the consequences of a botched Brexit
and a calamitous response to the COVID-19 pandemic by turning to a distinctly
U.S. model of politics.
This makes
some sense. Johnson’s victories in the Brexit referendum and last year’s
general election relied on disaffected former Labour voters who placed cultural
values ahead of the threats of economic disaster. They weren’t the only part of
his coalition or even the largest, but they were the vital new ingredient of
the majorities that overturned British politics.
These voters’
attitudes were examined and compared to party activists and members of
Parliament in a report by the UK in a Changing Europe think tank. The results
were quite startling. Instead of voters and MPs being more or less aligned in
Labour and Conservative, with the activists in both parties further from the
center, Conservative MPs are a huge distance to the right of both their
activists and still more their voters when it comes to economic questions. But
on social or libertarian questions, they are well to the left of their voters
and their activists. They may even be slightly to the left of mainstream public
opinion: On capital punishment, which half the population still supports,
Conservative MPs are much more abolitionist.
Labour, by
contrast, is slightly to the left of public opinion on economic matters and
clearly to the left on cultural ones. But when the polling drilled down into
the attitudes of former Labour voters who had gone for Leave in the referendum
and the Tories in the subsequent general election, they were uniformly to the
right, or authoritarian, side of even other Conservative voters. In American
terms, they are the voters who were the matter with Kansas. They vote
consistently against their own economic interests on the basis of their cultural
values.
If anyone
was supposed to behave like this in traditional British politics, it was the
altruistic middle classes, voting for tax rises because they believed in a more
fair society. Now we have a section of the working class voting for tax cuts
because they want a society with more law and order. This very American
phenomenon seems to be the last best hope of the Conservative Party now that
Labour has a competent and electable leader. As one Conservative MP told the
Atlantic’s Helen Lewis, “The party hoped beyond hope to fight the next election
on identity rather than economics, given the British economy is likely to still
be in the toilet by 2024. A therapeutic crusade against the ‘loony left’ while
actually being fairly social liberal in comparison to the average voter would
be just the electoral ticket.”
But what do
they plan to do with the power they have? One answer was provided by the
resignation, over the weekend, of Sir Mark Sedwill, the head of the civil
service and, simultaneously, the national security advisor. This was clearly a
move toward a much more politicized civil service and in particular one more
malleable to the desires of the unelected advisor Dominic Cummings, who has
fought the civil service ever since he was an advisor to Michael Gove at the
Education Department.
Gove’s
remarkable Ditchley lecture last weekend (which textual analysis suggests was
written by Cummings) was much taken up with the praise of U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, as was Johnson’s rather wafflier speech on Tuesday. The
degree of concentration on a rather mythical version of the United States in
Gove’s speech was extraordinary: He mentioned “Europe” only twice—once as a
place where the parties of the old left were breaking up and once as a place
that was hostile to refugees. The chutzpah, from the man who masterminded the
xenophobic Leave campaign, is breathtaking. But the word “Brexit” nowhere
appeared in his speech. Neither, of course, did “Trump.” To paraphrase another
absent U.S. president, Lyndon B. Johnson: If your mother-in-law had only one
eye, and that one eye was in the middle of her forehead, would you keep her in
the living room?
Even when
Gove (or Cummings) diagnosed the ills of the world, the choice of words
suggested that they were already speaking from the other side of the Atlantic:
“As the British author David Goodhart analyzed in his book The Road to
Somewhere, the gap between those with connections and credentials who can live
and work anywhere and those with fewer resources who remain rooted to the
heartland has only widened in recent years. His work, preceded by Christopher
Lasch, has been supplemented by the writings of Paul Collier and J.D. Vance
among others, and they all underline that those in the elite with cognitive skills,
qualifications, and professional mobility tend to have, or develop, different
social and political values from other citizens.”
That’s four
authors cited, and only the British one is identified by nationality. And one
has to wonder just how profound and groundbreaking it is for an Etonian like
Goodhart to discover that the elite has “different social and political values
from other citizens.” Do they teach anything else at Eton?
The
elevation of FDR as a mythical leader, a kind of Moses whose example shows us
how to lead a nation out of the wilderness, does mark a real break with British
tradition, quite as much as the attempt to bend the will of the civil service
to that of unelected political advisors like Cummings. When Roosevelt was
alive, and at least until the Margaret Thatcher years, the idea among British
politicians was not that they should learn from America but that they should
teach them: Greeks to your Romans, and all that. It wasn’t a very good idea,
but it was an important defense against the reality of fading British power.
It was
first in the Tony Blair years that the British left started to use the United
States as an inspiration. For the right, it was still Winston Churchill, and
until very recently Churchill was certainly the wartime leader with whom
Johnson most wanted to be confused. He had after all written a sort of
biography of him. But under the strain of real government and real opposition,
Johnson’s Churchill imitation has become impossible even for his own party to
believe in.
The
advantage of Roosevelt is that he is, for most British people now, an almost
entirely mythical figure, quite as much as Moses. The attempt to claim his
mantle makes, then, a kind of diversionary sense. What it diverts us from is
the last and most significant way in which the Johnson government would like to
ape the United States.
It is not
just the weaponization of culture wars or even the rousing of the masses
against the elite. It’s the attitude toward power and tradition. Donald Trump
and FDR have nothing else in common, but both were understood to be riding
roughshod over the inherited rules—both written and unwritten—that limited the
power of the presidency. In the same way, the Brexiteer movement with Cummings
at its center first used the referendum vote to bend Parliament to its will and
now is using the general election victory to try to crush the independence of
the civil service. There is no consistency, of course, in the British
Conservative Party following FDR in all the ways in which he most scandalized
conservative opinion at the time. But the Tories are not concerned with ideas
and never much have been. That’s not to say they’re stupid, but they understand
that ideas are only ever interesting as a means to power.
Andrew
Brown is a British journalist and former Guardian editorial writer. He won the
2009 Orwell Prize for political writing for Fishing in Utopia, his book about
Sweden in the high noon of Social Democracy. Twitter: @seatrout
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