The one good thing to come out of Brexit: a
bonfire of national illusions
David
Edgerton
Labour must wake up and offer an alternative vision
for Britain’s future – not just more competence
Illustration
by Ben Jennings
Illustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian
Fri 1 Jan
2021 07.00 GMT
They have
done it. The right wing of the Conservative party has won a historic victory.
The UK will be a sovereign “third country”, with a limited trade deal with the
EU. The UK, rightwingers believe, has been reconciled to its true history as a
nation of offshore islanders.
But they
have also failed, according to their own terms. Theresa May’s “red, white and
blue” Brexit is long dead, and a bad deal turned out to be better than no deal.
The EU will not be supplanted by a great new Europe where British trade flows
unimpeded; there are now frictions and barriers, not least in services. Any
serious deregulatory move by the UK will be met with EU retaliation.
In short,
the UK has repatriated economic sovereignty and discovered that, far from
allowing it to humble the EU, it has harmed itself. Leaders who supposedly
stood up for the greatness of the renewed British nation have been revealed as
“champions of free trade” who don’t understand the modern economy – and as
boastful flag-waving nationalists who don’t realise that great British rulers
once looked down on such tinpot antics.
As things
now stand, Brexit is a pointless gesture, a politics of headlines in which
sovereignty is performed by bleating world-beating absurdities. Remarkably,
four years on from the referendum, it is still a promise without a plan. We
have broken out of one regime of international relationships into a holding
position – worse than what came before, but with the possibility of redemption
or damnation, or, more likely, stagnation.
We might
end up with a renewed plebiscitary and parliamentary democracy in which the
people take back control, and not just from Brussels. But Boris Johnson’s
cronyist Tories make the EU’s bureaucrats look like models of honest and
transparent politics; their systematic mendacity, abetted by a loyal press and
unconstrained by parliament, hardly inspires confidence. In fact, the
legitimacy of the nation has been severely dented, and Northern Ireland and
Scotland are likely to take leave of the sinking British ship of state.
In their
failure as champions of free trade, the Brexiters have actually repeated a
British failure of the 1950s, an attempt to create a western Europe-wide
industrial free trade area that led instead to the UK seeking entry to the
European Economic Community in 1961. Perhaps they might reach back even further
into history, to the aspiration of an earlier generation of Tory press lords,
who pushed for “empire free trade” in the 1920s and 1930s. These men – who had
“power without responsibility”, in Baldwin’s famous phrase – also failed, as
India and the dominions remained protectionist.
The
imperialists and press lords of that era wanted to create a trading bloc to
rival the United States; today’s Brexiters would prefer a deal with the
Americans, handing control to Washington rather than Brussels. But the US, even
after Trump, is still protectionist and deeply committed to exporting
low-standard foods.
There are
some other options left for Brexiters. The strong expat tendency might suggest
a Cayman Islands model: merging the UK with an archipelago of tax havens run
from the Caribbean, to create an even bigger rentiers’ paradise than the one we
already have.
As a last
option, they may give up on the rest of the world, and focus on national
renewal, on levelling up. But we already have some indication of how this is
going. The creation of new national business is in reality contracts for
cronies and dodgy startups angling for subsidies, while Brexiter businesses
actually invest overseas. We should hardly be surprised that “levelling up”
turns out to be a small pork-barrel fund for financing better bypasses.
Brexit has
nowhere realistic to go, for Brexiters at least. Does it offer possibilities
for Labour? For now the answer is no, given that Labour’s position is to be
patriotic and prostrate. Indeed, Brexit is a potent reminder of the power of
new conservative ideas in shaping Labour’s agenda. In the 1930s, Labour
followed the Tories from being a party of free trade to one of imperial
protection – and then, to backing the EEC, and in the 1990s, to globalisation
and the free market.
That
pattern is being repeated with Brexit – not merely by virtue of Labour voting
in favour, but in accepting a propagandistic Tory analysis of its causes. Keir
Starmer is straining to appeal to a mythical ur-Labour voter, constructed like
a specimen of stone age man by Tory paleontologists of the “red wall”.
Yet the
ideological maelstrom of Brexit gives Labour the opportunity to abandon old
nostrums and re-energise itself with a new national mission and a new history
of its own. The left needs to disabuse itself of the cosy and outdated notion
that Britain’s ills are caused by imperial hangovers and a consequently
incompetent upper-class elite. Labour needs to wake up and offer an alternative
future to contest the Tory narrative – one that amounts to more than just
better welfare and more administrative competence.
Labour
could start by being nostalgic not for a Tory past, but a Labour one: of
greater equality, of common purpose, of strong trade unions, of rising wages,
of meaningful work. Labour could embrace the idea of a refreshed democracy, of
really taking back control – of an anti-elite politics rather than a reheated
technocracy. It could once again become the party that offers a national,
collective critique of the elite and its power – as it was from the 1930s into
the 1970s – and propose a policy of national reconstruction and equality.
Labour should be the party that speaks in realities, not in celebratory
fantasies, and seeks to create a truthful democratic politics, which is
essential to any real programme of progressive change.
The one
good thing to come out of Brexit is the bonfire of national illusions which is
about to rage. It would be tragic if Labour were to try to put it out. For in
its own way, Brexit has forced some essential understanding of Britain’s place
in the world.
It is no
longer even potentially “top nation”. It will not escape the orbit of Europe –
it never did, even at the height of its power. It must imitate far more than it
innovates. Understanding these truths is crucial to a genuine national
reconstruction, which should aim to create a real better country, not to fake
being the best.
A policy of
national reconstruction, for the foundational economy, for the support of
better everyday life, needs to be built on a double critique – of the failed
policies of the past 40 years, and of the Brexit ultras seeking an even more
disastrous turbo-Thatcherism. For Labour, this moment represents a historic
political opportunity: a chance to rethink its own past, and write a new history
for the British nation.
David
Edgerton is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth
Century History. He is Hans Rausing professor of the history of science and
technology and professor of modern British history at King’s College London
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