The worst election result since 1935? a tale of two measures

This is a slightly longer version of the presentation I gave at a session of the Progressive Britain conference (16 May 2021) on Labour and its history, alongside Steven Fielding and Patrick Diamond.

How is one to judge the success of the Labour Party over the past century?   In our Westminster-centric system it is little surprise that success is measured by achieving a majority in parliament.   Only three leaders have achieved that – Attlee, Wilson and Blair.  Labour has only twice been the largest party without a majority – in the 1970s, and in 1929, under MacDonald and Wilson. The 1924 Labour government was based on Labour as the second party. We might also ask who the Labour leaders were who deprived the Tories of a majority, without being the largest party. They were MacDonald, Brown and Corbyn.  Those who have failed to do even this were Henderson, Attlee, Gaitskell, Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock, Miliband and Corbyn.

But if one is interested in measuring degree of connection with the people, the reaching out, the support the Party received from the British people as a whole, the number of seats, nor the ability to form a government, are a good measure.

The reason for this is obvious and well known, but not well enough understood. It is that in FPTP there is (much of the time, but not always) a wild disproportion between support and seats.   For Labour, the extent and direction of the disproportion has changed radically over elections.  We can put it this way – at certain periods, the main determinant of electoral success for Labour has not been electoral support for Labour, but the quantity and distribution of support for other parties. Labour does not always deserve credit for winning, nor blame for losing.

What is interesting about 2017 and 2019 is that in both cases the seat share was very close to the vote share, for Labour that is. This previously happened only between 1951 and 1959, and in 1923. Otherwise the story of very significant disproportion of votes and seats.  It was extraordinarily negative in the 1930s, especially in 1931, when 30 percent of votes yield 8 percent of seats.  By contrast it was extraordinarily positive in the years 1997-2005.   Labour won a landslide in 1997 with a vote share just lower that that with led to a loss in 1970.

As the 1935 result has been repeatedly referred to recently it is worth looking at a little more. In fact, it was Labour’s best performance in vote share of the interwar years, and saw an increase in the number of seats. Labour got 38 percent of the vote. But it got just 25 percent of the seats.  Give or take one point, 38 percent was the Labour share in two elections in 1974 and in 1979.  In 1974 that resulted first in a minority government, then a small majority government, and in 1979 a  major loss.   That 1935 share was 3 percentage points better than that of 2005, when Labour of course got a majority.  A better share in 2017 than 2005 gave Labour increased seats compared with 2015,  but in 2017 it was not even the largest party.   And in 2019 Labour did better in share than in 2010 and 2015 but worse in seats.  The reason was that for no fault of its own the system and the distribution of support for others, was no longer giving labour more seats than its share implied.

If we take that 1997 vote share as a benchmark, then we can see that Labour equalled or beat that in every general election from 1945 to 1970 inclusive.  In 1997 Blair did as well, but no better, than Gaitskell in 1959, who lost.    The really big Labour successes, with three percentage points more than 1997,  include the famous 1945 election.    But they also include 1951, when Labour had its greatest vote share ever, but lost, and 1966, which is the most forgotten Labour success of all.   

In the years 1945-70 Labour never fell below 43 percent vote share.  Since then it was only exceeded this level once, in 1997, and approached it only twice in 2001, and 2017 with 40 percent.

Since 1945 in terms of vote share ranked by the best performance of each leader has been in the order:  Attlee, Wilson,  Gaitskell, Blair and Corbyn. The worst have been, in decreasing badness, Foot, Brown, Miliband, Kinnock, Corbyn, Blair, Callaghan and Wilson.  Corbyn has been neither the best, obviously, nor the worst.    

This is also true  in term of seat shares. The worst seat shares were obtained by Henderson, MacDonald, Attlee, Corbyn, Foot, Kinnock, Miliband, in that order (excluding 1918).  The best, in order, by Blair, Blair, Attlee, Wilson, Blair.   But, to return to my point: Henderson and Attlee were in 1931 and 1935 massively disadvantaged by the electoral system; Corbyn was not. But Blair was massively helped by the system and Attlee and Wilson much less so.

Looking to the future, how might we reflect on this past? Perhaps this is the way to think about it: there was a unique period from 1945 to 1970 when the vote share hovered between 43 and 48 percent.  This was without question Labour’s great period of electoral, political and social success – the only moment it consistently got a (small) majority of the working class vote.   What needs to be emulated it seems to me is the record of getting support, transforming the country, and keeping support, not least while in office. Labour’s greatest success, tellingly after years of government, came in 1951, when the system turfed it out.  The only other time Labour increased its vote after being in office was in 1966, and that was its second-best vote share.  Labour has not achieved this since.

Since 1970  the picture is very different – since 1970 the electorate has been fickle, but in long waves. Share has oscillated between 43 and less than 30. From 1970 to 1983 there was a collapse in vote share; the same thing happened between 1997 and 2010 (another 13 year period). From the peak of 2017, 2019 saw a major fall. The question is will this continue for more elections, as the record post-1970, and post-1997 suggest?  Will recent history repeat itself, that is,  will the next elections in say 2024 and 2029 get us back to 2010 or 1983?  Let us hope not.

Thoughts on Tom Nairn, Prince Philip, and the modernity of the British monarchy

The British monarchy prides itself on its exceptional antiquity, its hundreds of years of nearly uninterrupted legitimate succession. It even occasionally alludes to rule by divine right and even at times to the healing royal touch.   But it has a powerful modern side. The Duke of Edinburgh was in effect a Prince Consort of the Jet Age, the great patron of British science and engineering.   That image is not a familiar one today for the Prince stood for a certain prickly backwardness, and a pioneering anti-wokeness.

It is tempting to dismiss the antique monarchy as mere mumbo-jumbo that makes no difference. For Tom Nairn, in a celebrated book, The Enchanted Glass, which demands republication just as much as the recently re-issued Break Up of Britain, the monarchy mattered. It embodied, and more than that sustained, a backward antique state, one that made it impossible for a proper modern democratic nation to emerge.  It kept the nation infantilised. More than that, it also helped keep the nation stuck in an Edwardian time warp, incapable of transforming itself economically and industrially.  

That thesis does not quite fit with the story of the new Prince Consort egging on the nation’s engineers.

Although not keen on bicycles the British monarchy  were, on one side of their face,  the very model of a modern monarchy. The great royal rituals are, as David Cannadine revealed in the 1980s, inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,  created alongside the great royal processional way that is The Mall.  The monarchy spoke through radio long before most people had receivers.  In 1953 the Coronation was broadcast on television, to a nation in which the TV set was a rarity, generating a boom in sales.  

The emphasis on the modern was particularly evident in the new Elizabethan Age, as the cliché had it.  This was the era of heroic test-pilots, sleek new jets, the Comet airliner and its tragedies.  It was also the time when the UK had (really) easily the most ambition nuclear electricity plans in the whole world.  It was building its own rockets too.  Prince Philip was intimately associated with all this. His visits to nuclear reactors, his flying in the latest aeroplane, were all staples of newsreels and television.     But it went deeper.  He had particularly strong and enduring relations with aeronautical and scientific and technological institutions.  He was Grand Master of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators; Honorary President of the Royal Aeronautical Society, President of the Council of Engineering Institutions and patron of many more such institutions.   Prince Philip was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951, he was President of the Royal Society of Arts from 1952. Anyone interested in the history of modern British science or technology will see his name pop up again and again as the author of the preface or a celebratory history or a worthy biography. It is telling that Prince Philip House is the home of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a body he had an important backroom role in creating.

The British machines of the 1960s and 1960s which generated such royal enthusiasm could not compete with those of republican America. They were extravagant gestures, technological equivalents of a bloated civil list, great status symbols of little economic worth.  They were, as many claimed at the time, machines made for prestige reasons, not ones which could earn dollars. Great power delusions were condensed into glistening metal.

There is a persistent myth that in the UK that the aristocracy and the ruling class more generally were dim-witted Luddites.  In this story it is only with the North Country,  middle-class Harold Wilson that technology enters the story.   It is a misunderstanding.  In fact, the Labour roundheads cut back on the technological extravagance of the cavaliers. Harold Wilson’s white heat was about restraining excesses. To the horror of Tory England he cancelled the TSR2 and nearly ditched the Concorde.  Wilson’s Britain recognised, though not nearly enough, that it had to cut its technological and scientific coat  to suit its cloth.  

It is tempting when discussing royal matters to turn to explanations rooted in blood rather than soil. Did the monarchy’s modernising impulse come to the last great power monarchy through an infusion of teutonic technocracy? After all, the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas gave the monarchy the modernising Prince Albert. The Battenbergs, soon translated into Mountbattens,  brought dynamism and media savvy, and enthusiasm for technology too, in the form of Lord Louis Mountbatten.   Surely his nephew, Prince Philip,  of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, who also changed his name to Mountbatten, was continuing this tradition?  In the mythologies of British history, where the Germans are the moderns, and the British the ancients, such a story would make perfect sense.

It is however nonsense. The modernising impulse needs to be found much closer to home.  What both Louis and Philip Mountbatten had in common was that they were both British naval officers.  One ended up as First Sea Lord, the other late in life with the Gilbert and Sullivanesque title of Lord High Admiral.  The Royal Navy was the beating technological heart of the British state, deeply committed to the view that in matters geostrategic modern machines trumped men.  The 1950s enthusiasm for bombers and bombs, reactors and rockets,  was just one manifestation of this long standing elite project.

That world was long gone. But in recent years have seen a nostalgic look back at this Dan Dare world has become quite common.  It is part and parcel of new elite fantasies about global Britain as a science superpower.   But it should remind us that an over-weaning focus on innovation is far from an exclusive enthusiasm of the left, even in the UK.  Technology and reaction can and do go together, even in the UK.  The problem of the monarchy is not that it entrenched backwardness, but very modern forms of privilege, in very modern ways.  It matters because it is modern, not because of its antiquity.

One good thing could come out of Brexit: a bonfire of national illusions

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.

Continued in the Guardian 1st January 2021

Cummings has left behind a No 10 deluded that Britain could be the next Silicon Valley

Talk of ‘moonshots’ is typical of the belief that the UK is an innovative state – but it’s far from it

Though many have speculated on what Dominic Cummings’s “legacy” might be, one of the more significant contributions he made to No 10 was his thinking about science and technology. Prime ministerial speeches have been peppered with passé futuristic slogans about how Britain leads the world in quantum computing, genomics and AI, and promises that the country can be a “science superpower” – notions that Cummings made a central part of the Brexit project.

Like many a macho innovation guru, Cummings is an amateur not a professional, an artless nerd and not an expert. That his policies and prescriptions have been taken seriously is a measure of our collective credulity about Britain’s place in the world of innovation. But whether this foolishness will leave with the fool is another matter.

Continued in the Guardian 18 November 2020

The Tories aren't incompetent on the economy – they know exactly what they are doing

“There is no alternative” was the mantra of British politics from the 1980s to the very recent past. To bring about change it was necessary to unleash enterprise, or globalisation, or technology. Politics was about staying out of the economy, and coping with the social consequences. But there always was an alternative – it is just that the loudest voices denied it. As Adam Tooze has noted, the state never left the economy, it just changed its role, and its visibility. Since the 1980s the economy has been actively reshaped by a series of political-economic decisions by successive activist governments.

Over the years, the aims of British political-economic policy have changed. Once, the main concerns were the national rate of growth, the national balance of trade, reducing inequalities within the boundaries of the nation, and strengthening the nation compared with others. Since the 1980s, and by these measures, things have not got better. Neither under Thatcher nor under New Labour, let alone more recently, did the UK achieve the rates of GDP growth of the 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1980s the balance of trade has stayed systematically worse than in the 1950s or 1960s. In relation to goods it is at the previously unthinkable level of -6% of GDP.

Continued in the Guardian 11 September 2020

Britain's persistent racism cannot simply be explained by its imperial history

The question of empire has become central to discussions of Britain’s national past. Some see residual imperialism as the prime element in a deficient, delusional, racist culture. Others think emphasising the dark underside of empire is an attempt to erase British history. The problem is that although long historical tradition sanctions criticism of imperialism, national history has proved far more resistant.

Continued in the Guardian 24 June 2020

See also the letter by Dan Carter Guardian 25 June 2020

How the myth of “Britain alone” overshadows VE Day

A longer version of the article below appeared in the New Statesman 15 May 2020

On VE Day the streets of British towns and cities were bedecked with flags. If one looks carefully at the films and photographs it is clear that not only Union Jacks were flying. It is especially obvious in colour pictures that there were also flags of the United Nations, the countries fighting the Axis countries. Especially prominent were those of the US, but also the USSR and China.  

In its last years, the Second World War was a profoundly internationalist war. This was reflected by propaganda and in film. One of the most compelling expressions is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s extraordinary 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, in which a heavenly world assembly of all the nations decides on who lives and who dies. 

That we forget all this is no accident. The UK and US governments have long downplayed VE Day and played up D-Day. It is striking how little date recognition there is for 8 May in the UK, compared with, for example, France. The reason is simple: VE Day highlighted victory in a war against fascism in which the USSR played a pivotal role. D-Day had a different ideological message – it was a joint UK-US liberation of Europe from tyranny.  It rather left out the Canadians, Poles and others, and most dramatically of all, the complementary Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1944, the Red Army advanced very much faster, and with much heavier casualties, than the United Nations forces in the west.  

More important still for our forgetting is the British emphasis on defeat and resistance in 1940 rather than on victory in 1945. That deliverance at Dunkirk, the heroics of the Battle of Britain, and the cheerful coming together in the Blitz, are at the heart of the story of Britain standing alone and beginning to fight a people’s war. 

Curiously enough, the story of the nation standing alone was essentially created in 1945. In his official VE Day declaration in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill recounted: “After gallant France had been struck down we, from this island and from our united Empire, maintained the struggle single-handed for a whole year until we were joined by the military might of Soviet Russia.”

Churchill used the standard Conservative imperial “we” as he also did when addressing what was sometimes known as the Imperial Parliament. As the USSR was one of the big three, he could not but mention its role. After leaving the Commons, however, he spoke to the crowds in Whitehall from the balcony of the Ministry of Health in very different terms. He struck a very different and long resonating note: he now maintained that the “British nation” and the “ancient island” had been alone, not the Empire as a whole.   

This was also the story told in “Mr Churchill’s declaration of policy to the electors”, the 1945 Conservative Party election manifesto, which although much concerned with Empire and imperial trade, used a national rather than imperial “we”. Churchill went on to use this term alone in his best-selling and influential history of war, which chided the US for being late to enter the conflict. It stands in stark contrast to what he said in 1940-44, when if anything was alone it was the Empire, but the usual emphasis even then was on having allies. 

There were important reasons for insisting that the nation was alone in 1940-41. The first was that the British role in combat in 1940-41 was much greater than in 1945. The UK had declined relatively since 1940 and now stood in the shadow of the US and the USSR. Nor was the Empire what it had been in 1940 – it was now much more of a commonwealth of nations (outside of the colonies) who were part of the United Nations in their own right. Malaya, British Borneo and Hong Kong were still under Japanese control on VJ Day, when Japan formally surrendered.

There was also a pressing financial reason to insist that the nation, and not the Empire, was alone in 1940-41. As peacetime approached, the British government knew it could not immediately pay for its vital imports, not least food, by exporting. During the war, most imports had not been paid for: the US and Canada supplied them for free, while the rest of the world, including parts of the Empire, in effect lent them. The British government wanted the US to maintain its support into the peace. 

The argument it used was that the UK was owed a debt. It went like this: from 1939 with France, but from June 1940 to the end of 1941, alone, the UK was fighting for a common cause. Others, specifically the US, should also have already been in the fight from the beginning.  Moreover, the UK had bought, for ready money, large quantities of arms and supplies from the US in this period, and had even paid for the building of arms factories in the US (something too often forgotten today). Furthermore, went the argument, it had reduced its exports and in effect borrowed from the Empire and British-linked territories to finance its contribution.  The notion of Britain “standing alone” was thus a claim on the US, a standing rebuke to a Johnny-come-lately ally.    

The US was having none of it. Lend-Lease stopped with VJ-Day in August 1945. The new Labour government was forced to negotiate a US loan, which was paid off in 2010 (and misleadingly described as paying off Lend-Lease), to pay for essential food and raw materials. It was to go on to exhort people to work hard to achieve “economic independence”. 

Thus what was understood as a war of allies, an imperial war, an internationalist war, came to be seen very differently after 1945. What developed was a picture in which a new nation was created as it fought alone. The Empire was airbrushed out, as were the United Nations, not to mention the great Anglo-French alliance which declared war in 1939. 

The war that had been a war of many countries’ people fighting together became, afterwards, a British “people’s war”. Lest we forget, the war was not as it came to be remembered.

The government’s response to Covid-19 and Brexit are intimately connected.

For a translation into Spanish see ‘¿Qué relación hay entre el Brexit y la respuesta del gobierno británico al Covid-19?’. See also the version in The New European 30 April 2020.

The government’s response to Covid-19 and Brexit are intimately connected.  Recognising this is vital to understanding the politics of both.  Indeed as the trade expert David Henig has noted, we will know that the UK is really serious about Covid 19 at the moment in which is prepared to say that a Brexit extension is needed. That moment has not yet come, indeed it has been rules out.

On the face of it there is a very great difference between the two policies. In the case of Brexit the government has consistently rejected the advice of economists including its own. In the case of Covid-19 it constantly re-iterated that it is ‘following the science’.   But there is an underlying connection which is important.  Brexiter arguments are centred on fantasies about British scientific and inventive genius. The government has sought to address Covid-19 at least in part on this deluded basis.

At the beginning Boris Johnson stood behind ‘the science’ to justify a UK-only policy of ‘delay’ of the Covid-19 virus. This involved minimal intervention in what Johnson took  to reminding us are the  ‘freedom-loving’ proclivities of those ‘born in England’.  Too late, what looked like a cunning plan to exemplify the virtues of the British way collapsed utterly. The UK is now broadly speaking following Europe and much of the rest of the world.  ‘Following the science’ now sounds like a way of not answering legitimate questions.

But when it comes to ventilators a Brexiter innovation fixated logic applies.  The current crisis has been an opportunity to illustrate the argument that the UK was a powerful innovation nation that could do very well without the EU. The government launched a programme, the details of which are still murky, to create new emergency ventilators.  First off the stocks in the PR blitz was the Brexiter Sir James Dyson, who was teaming up with another Brexiter capitalist Lord Bamford of JCB to make many thousands.  This, it turned out was just one of many projects to design new ventilators, and to modify others for mass production. There were lots of allusions to the second world war as if Spitfires had been conjured out of thin air in the heat generated by patriotic enthusiasm. It is telling too that the government decided not to take part in the EU ventilator procurement programme. This had to be a British programme for PR purposes, even though many of the companies making the components in the UK are European, like Siemens, Airbus, Thales ….

That wartime analogy was deeply misleading – the UK was a world leader in aircraft before the Battle of Britain. It had been making Spitfires since the late 1930s, and had huge long-planned specialist factories making them.  What is clear is that we are not in 1940.  The UK is not a world leader in ventilator manufacture, far from it. Furthermore the NHS (and this is a scandal) has been undersupplied with them.  The high-end ventilators the NHS now needs will and are coming from abroad.  It looks as if the British emergency ventilators will generally be low-end ones, and one at least has already been rejected. The ones that seem  to be doing into production are based on simple machines long in production in the UK. Indeed there may be a wartime analogy which could become pertinent. Churchill did attempt to conjure up new weapons in a hurry in the face of expert advice.  They included anti-aircraft rockets, spigot mortars, and indeed a trench-cutting machine.  They were universally late, did not work well or at all, and represented a huge waste of resources.

We should not be fooled into believing that there is a coherent industrial strategy emerging out of the epidemic, a determined move to national self-supply.  For if there were the government would not be throwing manufacturing in Britain to the winds, as it’s Brexit plans certainly would. For they involve the breaking up of regulatory and customs market in which they exist, and furthermore, would open the British market not only to European producers, but those from all other the world. That is what being a global champion of free trade means.

What we need to understand is the centrality of a mythical picture of British innovation to Brexit. Brexiter arguments for a hard Brexit hinge on the UK’s supposed leadership in creativity and innovation, which was just waiting to be unleashed.  Dominic Cumming’s got his £800m for his  ‘ARPA’ in the recent budget. The wonderful thing about invoking ‘science’ is that it suggests action, drive, modernity. Yet what Johnson and other Brexiters have  rediscovered was a great British liberal tradition of making a lot of noise about science in order to cover up deliberate inaction, in the face of demands for a national and imperial strategy for agriculture and industry.

Before the Great War, faced with calls from the Tories for tariffs on imports, not least food, which he vehemently opposed, Lloyd George funded agricultural research to help farmers instead.  Of course any help they might receive would be years in the future and trivial by comparison with tariffs. Similarly in the 1920s the government resisted protection and imperial preference by creating an Empire Marketing Board, one of whose major functions was research. It had minor impact, as intended, and was wound up the moment tariffs came in in the 1930s.

The strategy has been in action for a while. After 2008 there was much talk about the march of the makers, and the northern powerhouse.  One of the very few initiatives was the support, with £50m, of the Graphene Institute. Graphene, made by two Manchester University scientists, was seen as a wonder material, which would transform the fortunes of the University, its region and the whole country. It was trumpeted as a wonder material, the key to a vibrant new future. It has not arrived, and one of the discovers (they both won Nobel Prizes) spends much of his time in Singapore.  £50m buys a lot of media coverage; it does not buy you a real industrial strategy.  Innovation capacity in batteries has been a favourite for some years. Yet there is no significant British battery industry, nor the prospect of one.  Electric cars, and batteries for them, are very much more advanced in Europe, in China and in Japan.  One cannot magic an  industry out of thin air, whether high end ventilators or batteries, but by referencing innovation one can pretend, for a while. And that is where the politics of Covid-19, and Brexit, are stuck, in cynical fantasies about innovation.

As Labour elects a new leader, some thoughts on Labour's misunderstood history.

This article appeared in the Prospect under the title ‘Labour has to free itself from the shackles of its own invented histories’.

British politics has an intimate relationship to history, not least Labour politics. But it’s often a version of history that never really happened.  In order to generate fresh thinking about policy – something sadly lacking in the leadership debate – Labour has to free itself from the shackles of its own invented histories. An intelligent and respectful politics of the left needs a richer account of what Labour has proposed and what has actually taken place.

The standard history goes like this. Labour’s greatest triumph by far followed from the 1945 election. Clement Attlee’s Labour created the welfare state. It generated a new consensus, called the post-war settlement. From then on things decayed. Harold Wilson gave us the modernising White Heat, which soon fizzled out leaving only a few embers glowing. Harold Wilson returned in 1974 and with James Callaghan gave us more “tax and spend” and the “winter of discontent”. Poor old Michael Foot left the “longest suicide note in history”. Tony Blair under New Labour gave the party, according to taste, unprecedented sequential electoral success, or betrayed nearly everything Labour had stood for.

In political debates about Labour history, then, there are only three positive reference points: a great reforming state welfarist 1945 programme, a techno-enthusiastic 1960s programme, and a policy-light 1997 programme. And at first sight that looks like, from both sides of the argument, what the choices are today: back to 1945, or to 1997 minimalism, both perhaps with a dash of the white heat. Indeed Tony Blair in a recent speech full of incantations about a technological revolution, denounced Corbyn’s policy agenda as ‘ hopelessly out of date’ in its focus on the state,  and argued in effect for a return to 1997.  

But these reference points are too often little more than clichés, with little bearing on what Labour policy actually was. Ken Loach’s film The Spirit of ’45  told the story as the story of a creation of a welfare state where there had been none.  Jeremy Corbyn compared the possibilities of the 2019 election with those of 1945, evoking the creation of the NHS. In fact, health and social services (the term welfare state in the modern sense did not exist) barely figured in the party’s 1945 manifesto. What Labour did, once it was in office, was significant, but it did not create the welfare state, or even public medicine. It extended and reformed a Tory working-class welfare state from 80% to nearly 100% of the population. In doing so it made important advances, but it also entrenched the regressive Beveridgean poll tax and its concomitant low benefits. For all, rather than for the many, one might say. It was the universalism of the new welfare system (not least in health) and the new methods of delivery, the increases in some benefits, which were important, not the supposed creation of a system where there had been none.

In fact 1997 was a deeply welfarist moment. Indeed, only recently both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have argued that Labour’s whole tradition was to create and sustain a welfare safety net. Labour was welfare. But there had been another important welfarist moment: the 1959 manifesto, the high point of revisionism under Hugh Gaitskell.  Under the revisionists, and New Labour, the underlying argument was that capitalism, including British capitalism,  was doing just fine – what was needed was a tax and welfare system to make up for its limited deficiencies. Tax and spend was the policy, even though New Labour associated it with Old Labour (again illustrating how misleading the standard histories are).   In fact even if one looks at tax as a proportion of GDP, the  peak tax measured as tax and national insurance as a percentage of GDP came not in the Labour 1970s, but in 1981/82 and 1984/85, under the Tories.  Spending as a percentage of GDP, excluding investment, also peaked under the Tories,  in 1981/2. Incidentally the real industrial “winter of discontent” came in 1979-80, under the Tories.

In fact, for most of Labour’s history, it has downplayed welfare. Its manifestos promoted it as the party of social and economic transformation, not welfare. The 1945 manifesto, “Let us Face the Future”, claimed that that “the nation needs a tremendous overhaul, a great programme of modernisation” – and promise to bring that about by “keeping a firm constructive hand on our whole productive machinery”. This this spirit was present in most election programmes until the 1990s. It was revived, probably without recognition that this was a core Labour tradition, in the 2019 manifesto, with its promise of a Green Industrial Revolution destined to transform national infrastructures. Here was a commitment to putting the collective national interest ahead of private interests, and the 1964 spirit of the transformation of (private) business though modern technology, in a radically new context. Indeed, the 2019 manifesto was decidedly non welfarist, except in relation to housing and tuition fees. There was no proposed transformation of the welfare state, no return to benefit levels of the past. There was merely a much-needed rejection of recent cruel gaps, caps and clawbacks and a halting of Universal Credit until a better system is found.

It is also worth noting how much less radical the 2019 manifesto was in crucial respects. Compared to the nationalisation programme of 1945, the one proposed in 2019 was a minnow. The party did not propose nationalisation of manufacturing – whereas in 1945 iron and steel was included, and in the 1970s, aerospace and shipbuilding were to be added to the many already nationalised manufacturing sectors. In proposing to nationalise broadband the party followed the precedent set in 1868 for the telegraph and 1912 for the telephone, not that of 1945.   In 2019 it endorsed the Trident replacement, whereas in 1983 it was deeply hostile to nuclear weapons.  In 1983 it produced a pro-Brexit manifesto, in 2019 it wanted the closest possible relationship with the EU.  That 1983 manifesto was by the way not only very long, but also very thoughtful. It was a serious plan for transforming the British economy.

Labour’s past is a resource, an important one, for the party. But too often the usually recalled history does not do justice to the variety of Labour’s policies, politics and practices, which were never fixed in time, nor easily understood on the usually defined left-right axis. To reinvent itself, as either a radical or a conservative force, it needs not only a better grip on the present but a much richer, more practical understanding of its past.  One way or another it looks as if the future will require not merely welfarism but economic transformation and in this respect it has been Old Labour which saw the future first.

Don’t mention the war, please.

This article appeared under the title ‘Why the coronavirus crisis should not be compared to the Second World War: Military analogies are fuelling myths and fantasies about the UK’s wartime experience, in the New Statesman.

Could we please stop talking about the Second World War? Please?   The Covid 19 epidemic is not like the Second World War; ventilators are not Spitfires; we don’t need a wartime coalition; and no the Second World War doesn’t show that a hard Brexit is possible either.  Fantasy war stories have infected our political discourse for far too long. It is time to grow up, to think of better analogies, if any are needed at all. 

In fact it is a sad reflection on our times that anyone could mistake some ruffled posturing from the Prime Minister as anything to do with the Second World War, or indeed that forcing people to stay home, a collapse in economic activity and the closing down of much transport makes people think of the war at all.

For the war, generally saw increases in output, in the movement of people and goods, the bringing of people together in new forms, in barracks, in factories, on ships.  Workers were being taken on, not least by conscription to the armed forces.  People were asked to travel across the country. They were forced to congregate in barracks, in new factories. They were crammed onto ships. They also travelled on trains unlike never before. The war saw a great peak in train travel, not surpassed until recently.  The economics of war were those of mass purchasing by the state; investment by the state. The state controlled prices to stop them rising, they were aiming, though taxation to dampen demand since people had money, but everyday goods were in short supply. Governments battled inflation, not depression.  The most that dealing with War and dealing with Pestilence have in common is that they both involve strengthening the power, and the spending of, the state and that both require collective action.

What is curious however is the British tendency to see the British Second World War as a good thing, if not War in general.  It is interpreted as a moment of national pulling together, of collective action from below, which united the people in a common purpose. Everyone was in it together, and pulled together.  That is far too rosy a view.  

War was a matter of fighting, and putting aside other considerations. It set up new differences, radical ones. There were those in uniform and those not. Some in uniform were in great danger, most were not.  The rations for those in uniform and civilians were different. Workers in armaments had a privileged position compared to workers in less essential occupations.  Not everyone was affected by the Blitz, which lasted a few months in London, and in some places only a few days.  It tended to kill poor Londoners not a cross-section of society.  And, welfare services got worse during the war, not better.  

For the left the war has acquired a misleading reputation as the moment in which it came into its own. It used to be claimed that Labour (and especially Bevin or Attlee) successfully ran the Home Front, while Churchill fought the War itself.  But that was not so: Churchill and his key ministers ran the Home Front as well as the War. They were not separate things.  We have to be very careful with the notion that the war was good for socialism.

Other sorts of serious misunderstandings of the real war are at the basis of its invocation today.  One crucial one is that this was the moment in which the nation became militarily and economically self-sufficient.  It dug in, and dug for victory.   But the reality was very different. Britain was the heart of a great Empire which was at war; it had great allies too. Yet it also depended on the rest of the world. It did not retreat to a national redoubt, but in fact forged new global connections.  Vast amounts of food and fuel came from overseas.  And weapons also: even British rifles were manufactured abroad. The British nation was never truly an island, nor indeed was the British Empire.  The war was fought as a war of the United Nations against the Axis. It was not a war of nations, let alone one nation, but of people’s, of ideologies.  The British ideology of the war was not what we take it to be today – a belligerent nationalism, but rather a deeply internationalist, and often imperial one too.  Far from being anti-European it made common cause, obviously, with all non-fascist Europeans.

Finally, there is a fantasy about the war which sees the UK as weak at its beginning, but rose to industrial and social genius during it. The reality is that Winston Churchill took charge of a superpower, a great global empire. He didn’t conjure Spitfires, or ventilators, out of the air: he inherited a powerful military industrial machine which was already making them, and myriad other weapons in huge numbers, in the case of aeroplanes and warships on a greater scale than Germany.  The British Empire was truly a force to be reckoned with in the world; the UK of today is a minnow, rather pathetically claiming to be a world leader in this or that science. 

We need to remember too that by the end of war the UK was in a much weaker position internationally that in 1939. Through no fault of his own Winston Churchill presided over an extraordinary rapid relative decline in Britain’s power. 

Like Famine and Death, War and Pestilence are not good things.  Nor are they the same thing.  It is worth being careful about what one wishes for.

Some thoughts on the film 1917

1917 could have been a contender for Best Motion Picture of the Year, having won the Best Motion Picture, Drama at the Golden Globes.  Still it won seven BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, and  three Oscars, and more other prizes than one knew existed. The so-called liberal elites of Hollywood and the British film industry clearly loved it.  Yet the politics of the film are not simply outdated, they are Brexiter. They are the politics of the resentment of Germany and of plucky, united, Brits just about saving the day.  

For those who have not seen the film it is an extraordinary techno-fest.  Elaborate British and German trenches and artillery-blasted landscapes are astonishingly well recreated. Film critics have focussed on the very long tracking shots cleverly put together into one.  It can indeed be criticised for searching for mere verisimilitude rather than telling a decent story.  It is, in fact, a superior video game. Like videogames involving war and destruction and baddies it is a quest in the face of enemies.  But the enemy here is not some imaginary grotesque out of Lord of the Rings.  It is Germans.

Two British lance corporals are sent through no-man’s land to stop a British battalion from attacking the German lines. There are under the misapprehension they have the Hun on the run.  But the enemy are devilishly drawing them into a carefully and elaborately prepared trap.  Because the telephone lines have been cut, the only way to stop the upcoming massacre of the Tommies is to send our two heroes with a letter (uncoded) to the commanding officer of the isolated 2nd Devons.  They have a day and a night to get there. This is odd since a message could have been sent by one of the aeroplanes we later see flying about, but no matter. It is after all a game.

Our gallant heroes cross over into the abandoned German trenches and find not a mere dugout, but an astonishing underground barracks, with sprung (!) bunk beds.  Even their rats are bigger (an old joke I think).  The sneaky Germans have booby trapped the place, and a fat rat sets one off (why only now?), burying one of our hardy lads.  His mate saves him and they set off again. They then rescue a German pilot from his burning aeroplane. But the ungrateful bastard stabs one of our questers to death, the cheerful, funny, innocent one indeed. Our remaining NCO continues his journey, partly on a lorry with British troops who stray onto the scene.  He continues on his own and wounds a German, who even as he lies dying tries to kill him. After encountering the very picture of France, Marianne herself perhaps, looking after an orphaned baby, he sets off again, leaving her with milk he had conveniently picked up at the abandoned farm where they had encountered the German pilot. Then he comes across a retching drunken German and captures a German who promises to keep quiet to avoid alerting his inebriated colleague. You guessed it, the sneaky German calls out to his comrade, and nearly does for our hero.  

This is the sum total of the encounters with the Germans. The message: it would have been better to kill them first and ask questions later, for they are free of the slightest trace of gallantry.  Indeed nowhere in this film is there a shred of common feeling across the front, not the slightest echo of the Christmas Truce, no sense whatever of the common European tragedy that the Great War was.   This isn’t La Grande Illusion, or even The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but a wretched piece of narcissistic nationalism. The British are just too nice.

I was not prepared for this as none of the extensive press commentary that I read mentioned it. After seeing the film I read six reviews, and only one even hinted at what it called ‘an outdated and idealistic ode … in which the Jerries are sneaky’.   It is more than that, and what really depressing  that in 2020 a Great War film can still hide its politics so effectively from critics. Perhaps British men of a certain age and education, even today, see the Great War mainly as a test of manhood, something to regret not having taken part in.  In this context, beastly Germans are perfectly acceptable it seems.

The film shows a diverse British army. This drew some useful distracting fire from the fools who thought this was mere wokeishness, for there were indeed non-white British soldiers on the Western Front. We spy black soldiers in the background, and in the foreground a Sikh who can impersonate a high fallutin’ British officer better than the white squaddies.  This is as close the film gets to the Blackadder Goes Forth picture of the British officer class as donkeys who led lions.

That critical image is alluded to, in order to crush it comprehensively.  The film makes us expect the commanding officer of the 2nd Devons will ignore the incoming order and attack anyway, as a donkey would. But no, Colonel Mackenzie, like all the other officers shown in the film is gruff, sweary even, but definitely a lion, a caring lion indeed.  The message arrives late, but he stops the last wave of the attack, and calls back the unfortunates who went over before the order appeared.   Paths of Glory this film ain’t.

The quest, the journey, the game is over. Disaster is averted, the Hunnish plot is foiled.  Our fighting lads are in good hands.

But 1917 is not a game, nor even a boyish ripping yarn dressed up in spectacular sets and effects. Although more than faintly ridiculous it is a political intervention of astonishing crudity, presenting  a two world wars and one world cup view of history, but one so well adapted to our Brexiter times that no one seems to have properly noticed.   

When it comes to national emergencies, Britain has a tradition of cold calculation

The government’s reluctance to put the health of citizens first during the Covid-19 outbreak has echoes in the 1940s and 50s …. continued in Guardian

How Britain was sold: why we need to rethink the case for a national capitalism in the age of uncertainty.

How did the most successful conservative party of the 20th century become the agent for a national humiliation? How could a political party so firmly tied to power, not least economic power, come to disregard its own particular view of the national interest? Continued in the New Statesman

Brexit is a necessary crisis – it reveals Britain’s true place in the world

A determined ignorance of the dynamics of global capitalism is bringing about a long-overdue audit of British realities.

Who backs Brexit? Agriculture is against it; industry is against it; services are against it. None of them, needless to say, support a no-deal Brexit. Yet the Conservative party, which favoured European union for economic reasons over many decades, has become not only Eurosceptic – it is set on a course regarded by every reputable capitalist state and the great majority of capitalist enterprises as deeply foolish.

If any prime minister in the past had shown such a determined ignorance of the dynamics of global capitalism, the massed ranks of British capital would have stepped in to force a change of direction. Yet today, while the CBI and the Financial Times call for the softest possible Brexit, the Tory party is no longer listening.

Why not?  Read the rest in the Guardian 9 October 2019

What Technology Is Most Likely to Become Obsolete During Your Lifetime?

From Gizmodo

When we think about ‘technology’—a weird and wonderful, shape-shifting concept—we are quick to invoke ideas of time as a determinant. We expect some to become obsolete at some point, to come to an end, as they are replaced by new ones. This way of thinking is deeply ingrained. We think of particular historical times being characterized by particular machines or processes, and we imagine the future will be made anew by a few such machines and processes. The current favorite is something called AI. In this way of thinking some people are ‘ahead of their times’ while most of us, not having grasped the significance of what a few gurus claim to be the future, are of course ‘behind the times’.

But this still-dominant way of thinking is itself way behind the times. It’s a characteristically naïve, propagandistic way to talk about ‘technology’ which has been with us for a long time.

There are far better ways to think about the artifacts which are so central to our world. We might start with the argument that far from always replacing older types of things, new things often add to the old. We just have more of everything. We might also note that what we deem “old” things often change: they are both old and new. Similarly, lots of things we think of as new often contain very old elements. To be sure, certain things get less prevalent, though they sometimes reappear.

What then are the sorts of processes which make things disappear? It could be, for example, that spare parts, or fuels, are for some reason no longer available. It may be that something better comes along, and it is worthwhile stopping using the old machine and buying a new one. It may be that old machines simply break down, and cannot be replaced. Or it may be that certain kinds of machine or products are made illegal to own or produce. Thus there are few CFCs left in the world. Chemical weapons are much less prevalent than they were in the 1930s, say.

We might then ask what kinds of ‘technology’ might we want to be rid of in the next fifty years. Many would say any machine burning or using coal. To which others would add any machine using fossil fuels, and perhaps therefore most internal combustion engines. Note that we could, if we wished, get rid of all these things without introducing any novelties. We could extend the use of alternatives which already exist.

Lessons from the past – Why our current understanding of UK research policy is wrong

This post first appeared on the LSE Impact Blog

As a result of Brexit, research policy in the UK is being asked to perform an increasingly large array of functions and will likely undergo significant changes. In this post  David Edgerton draws on the findings of a recent British Academy report on the history of UK research policy to highlight how research policy in the UK is frequently misunderstood and argues that whereas other policy areas, such as economic policy, have well defined historical backgrounds, the lack of this knowledge in research policy renders the field vulnerable to mythmaking and the repetition of mistakes.

Much discussion of the relationship between history and policy assumes that policymakers are not already exposed to history.  However, in the case of research policy, history is already central; the problem is that it is largely the wrong history.  The quality of the historical and policy discourse around science policy is notably lower than for say economic or defence policy. A second problem is that while defence, or health, or economic, policy have reasonably robust common sense meanings, what ‘science policy’ refers to is not stable, and this matters a good deal.

Any proper application of history to policy has to be based on an accurate rendering of what actually happened in the past, as well as of what the policy objectives were. This is a tall order for science policy, as much of the older literature suffers from systematic flaws which make it unhelpful for policymakers.

Notably, by ‘science policy’, what is often meant, is policy for scientific research, not all science: it is not about policy for scientific knowledge as a whole (which would include education). They mean policy for research, but not all research. In practice, ‘science policy’ is policy for research funded by government agencies that are concerned with civil work of an academic character that is largely taking place in universities. It is the policy of ‘research councils’.  Now this might be a perfectly reasonable approach, but problems arise when research council research is identified with all government research, or all research. It is particularly inappropriate from a historical perspective.

A prime example of this tendency, which has been central to science policy discourse recently is the ‘Haldane Principle’ of 1918. It has been assumed that there was a single science policy governed by a single principle, though one never clearly defined, along the lines that scientists determined science policy. In fact, there was no such 1918 Haldane principle, nor could Lord Haldane ever have defined one principle for science policy. He understood very clearly that most research was done by departments, but he wanted some research to be done in a semi-independent way by what we now call research councils. He had his model in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and he followed this precedent in recommending a similar structure for the Medical Research Council, a structure that was later adopted for other research councils. Haldane gave an intelligent set of reasons for having research councils alongside departmental research, envisioning each doing different sorts of things under different kinds of control.  The ‘Haldane principle’ of 1918 which is alluded to today, was an invention of the 1960s and reflected a poor understanding of actual research policies and practices even then.

The ‘Haldane Principle’ isn’t the only fanciful history of science policy that policymakers argue with.  In discussions of science policy one will hear that science in Britain is on tap, not on top; that there has long been a deep division between ‘two cultures’; that the civil service has been dominated by classicists, perhaps even historians; that apart from the world wars and Harold Wilson’s White Heat of the Technological Revolution, science was ignored; that Britain has been good at inventing but bad at developing; that politics is short term so government has not been able to make the long term commitment innovation needed.

We also know that British universities were until recently ivory towers dominated by arts faculties. It is all bunk, and needs to be understood as left-overs from the claims of self-interested parties who have sought to promote science, and their science, by using stories of failure, indifference to science, and all the rest.  Indeed, a useful rule of thumb is that expenditures, influence, and impact correlate positively with the strength of the arguments that claim they are low.  Thus, complaints about lack of R&D funding peaked at the moment in British history when R&D funding was at its highest as a proportion of GDP (the early 1960s).

One result of the shrinking of departmental research and industrial research in the UK was that research councils have loomed larger and larger in successive governments’ R&D spending. Leading politicians and others  to increasingly look to the research councils to produce inventions that would generate economic growth; and the research councils began to look to argue that they could do this. There was, and still is, much talk of entrepreneurial universities, spin-outs, and of course Silicon Valley. A point of view that regards the UK as having a uniquely strong ‘science base’, which needs to be exploited by more vigorous entrepreneurship. Research policy has thus become a substitute for an active industrial policy that would upset the status quo. It is cheap.  A huge fuss was made of a £50m Graphene centre. But if the potential was as great as was made out, £50m was a paltry sum in a world where £50bn bought a short-distance railway. Brexit has only made the rhetoric of British strength in invention and innovation more detached from reality, with talk of the UK leading the world into the fourth industrial revolution. Delusions of grandeur in innovation are just as damaging as those in economic or defence policy, but alas without any wider historical understanding much less likely to be challenged.

About the author

David Edgerton is a historian of science and technology and of twentieth-century Britain and the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation and contributed to a British Academy Report for BEIS on the history of science policy.

Note: This article gives the personal view of the author, and not the position of the LSE Impact Blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

Featured image credit: Mike Peel, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY SA 2.5)

What has British science policy really been?

‘What has British science policy really been?’ in British Academy, Lessons from the History of UK Science Policy (2019), pp. 31-9 - in this contribution I tell a brief alternative story of British research policy in the twentieth century arguing that much of the history of research policy is bunk, that research policies have been undertaken by multiple agencies and their scope and ambition have changed radically over time; that research policies need to be understood in the context of national defence, industrial, economic, and agricultural and other policies; that, in the past, research policies have been seen as a substitute for radical policies that governments did not favour; that today perhaps the most important lesson is not to indulge in delusions of grandeur about the quality and significance of British science. Its weight in the world has changed drastically, as has that of British business, and this needs to be understood for the development of an effective policy. And lastly, in recent years research policy has been a substitute for industrial policy, just as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Brexiteers’ greatest trick was convincing the old they hated Brussels more than London

The politicians and financiers of the Leave campaigns turned the latent politics of anti-London into the politics of anti-Brussels.

This blog first appeared 7 August 2019 on the New Statesman Staggers Blog

The politics of Brexit – or UKexit as it should be called, for it will take the UK, not Britain, out of the EU – has been addressed in many different ways. But two dimensions have generally remained missing from most analysis: the politics of anti-London, and of the old. 

The Brexit vote came from non-metropolitan areas of England, mainly from Conservative voters, as Anthony Barnett emphasises. These were votes of the old. Indeed, Brexit was framed to appeal to the old, as a desire to return to a national past, and a critique of the nature of an ever more powerful capital. Brexiteers, the politicians and financiers of the Leave campaigns, also turned the latent politics of anti-London into the politics of anti-Brussels, a formidable and significant achievement. 

It is obvious that the recent experience of London has been very different from that of the rest of the UK. London has emerged as a city state of great wealth and power, a growing, young, cosmopolitan island in a fallen nation. London is successful in a nation which, generally, is not. 

This was an unexpected development. In the thriving post-war United Kingdom, London was a declining city, reaching its nadir in the early 1980s. London had turned inward as the capital of a new nation usually called Britain, having been an outward-looking capital of global capitalism and empire. 

Yet in the new liberal economy since the 1980s, London was to boom, returning in many ways to the pomp of the Edwardian years. On the surface it seems that the world of Mary Poppins – bankers, nannies, and all – has returned.

But the cosmopolitan and global city of today is very different from Edwardian London. The city is now a place where world capitalism does business, no longer one where British capitalism did the world’s business. To an astonishing degree, London has a larger role in world finance than the whole United Kingdom does in world trade. 

The city once exported capital, and sucked in the profits of that investment. London now imports foreign capital and foreign talent. In 2018, 37 per cent of London’s population was born outside the UK, and 22 per cent were not British nationals (compared with 9 per cent for the UK). For the rich London borough of Westminster, the non-British population is 49 per cent. The new London has an immigrant elite, and is one of the cosmopolitan capitals of a global kingdom of capital. 

All this pointed to a possible rebellion of the provinces against capital, of industry against finance, of workers against owners, of the nation against globalisation. But that political potential could not be realised through the existing parties. New Labour was the party of global liberalism, and was born out of the rejection of the politics of the nation Labour espoused into the 1980s. Furthermore the key anti-New Labour elements (Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn) of the Labour Party were London-centred and stood for the capital’s multi-culturalism, if not its capitalism. Nor could the renewed Tories of the 2010s be a party of the provinces or of the makers. Remade in the image of New Labour it was led by London-financial figures, like David Cameron and George Osborne. 

Even the Brexit parties were themselves London oriented. The first significant Eurosceptic was Sir James Goldsmith, funder of the Referendum Party (1997), a London-based Anglo-French financier. Ukip’s (and now the Brexit Party’s) Nigel Farage is not a manufacturer from the North, but had been a minor City of London figure, displaced by international capitalism. The other key agents in Brexit have been three major London newspaper groups – the owners of the Daily Telegraph, the Times and Sun, and the Daily Mail – with owners financially centred outside the UK. 

But the Eurosceptics did mobilise the potential English anti-London vote. In the code of being hostile to immigrants and experts, Westminster politics and the “metropolitan elites”, they were attacking something very much like London, and nothing which was recognisably the rest of the country. But this London could not be named, or its full reality attacked, for Leave was also London politics. 

Such a strategy could not work for the young: London represents a world of possibilities, for good and ill. Indeed London is young: it has twice the proportion of 25- 34-year-olds of the UK as a whole. For the old, however, the new London can be presented as alien, and a betrayal of the idea of a united British nation led from London. 

There is no doubt that the old have been mobilised behind the Tories and Leave. Some 64 per cent of over 65s voted Leave; in 2015, 64 per cent of over 65s voted Tory or Ukip, and among this age group the Tories had a 24 per cent lead over Labour. What’s more, 60 per cent of 2015 Tory voters voted Leave, and more, surely, of the historic Tory voters, many of which had previously switched to Ukip. 

The politics of the Tories has been the politics of keeping of the old vote. The prices of their houses have been kept high, their pensions protected, and their cost of living kept low. The NHS – a service primarily for the old – and pensions were specifically excluded from austerity. As many have noted, the Brexit vote was not generally a vote of the economically desperate; indeed Will Davies sees it in part as a rentier vote.

The politics of Brexit has also been a politics of the old. Newspapers have for decades been mostly Eurosceptic. They are read by declining numbers of old readers. The Leave campaign summoned up, as central to its programme, a past where the nation was sovereign and in control. 

It was suggested to the old (who had voted Remain in 1975) that they could return to the national world they knew in their youth, where nearly everything in the United Kingdom, whether cars, or food, was British. They were invited to wallow in the nationalist (not imperial) nostalgia of their youth, expressed in the belief that “Britain” was alone in 1940. In 1940 things were very different, a reason perhaps, the very old were more likely to have voted Remain than the merely old. In contrast to most great political projects, Brexit was not sold as a vision of a new future. Nor behind the silence were there any serious plans for how to bring Brexit about, or analyses of what its effects would be. 

The Leaver ideologues have no intention of creating a new British nation pulsating with national effort. For them the future is London selling deregulated financial services to the world, while the people get tariff-free uncontrolled food and manufactures from abroad, as domestic agriculture and industry crash. 

Brexit is a London project, a radical Thatcherite free-trading and financial project which will increase the division between London and the rest of the UK.  It is the revenge of the hardest of Thatcherites, feeding off the nationalism of the old, which they themselves betrayed long ago. If, as was once famously said, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, then Brexit is the radical liberalism of fantasists and the nationalism of the deluded. 

David Edgerton is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a twentieth-century history (Penguin).

Gordon Brown and British Nationalism

I was on Newsnight all too briefly on 25 June 2019 discussing Gordon’s Brown’s comments on the Union.  Most was cut, but I  was prompted to write the following as Brown illustrated rather well some themes of my The Rise and Fall of the British Nation (Penguin, 2019).

Gordon Brown is a British nationalist in denial. His is a nationalism that cannot speak its name, because it denies that British nationalism could be like other nationalisms.  He hates the nationalism of others, including that of Scots. He has laid all this out with some clarity in an article in the   Daily Mail (‘Why I fear the break-up of the United Kingdom is closer than it's been for 300 years’, 25 June 2019) to accompany a speech in London.

Gordon Brown is a unionist. While in government wanted to give the United Kingdom a National Day, to upstage Saints Andrew, George, and Patrick to celebrate its peculiar All-Union British genius. Today he believes the Union, the United Kingdom, faces its greatest threat since the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707.   He does not wish to recall that most of Ireland left the United Kingdom in 1922, and the Commonwealth in 1949.  But not counting Ireland is par for the course.   

Brown does not like nationalism.  For him English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish nationalisms are a bad thing, to be contrasted with the United Kingdom’s  ‘shared values — tolerance, respect for diversity, being outward-looking’.   As he puts it: In our long history, we have prided ourselves on being patriots who love our country — not bitter nationalists who must hate our neighbours, demonise foreigners, immigrants or other minorities, and blame external forces for everything that goes wrong.  … Great Britain (sic) has been, until now, the most tolerant of countries and the most outward-looking.’   He associates this bitter nationalism with ‘Scottish nationalism, plus English nationalism, plus Welsh nationalism, plus Ulster unionism (sic)’.  That last point is illuminating wrong – for the Ulster Unionists are not Ulster nationalists, but British nationalists.  Yet they need to condemned, and Irish nationalists ignored.

Contrasting the United Kingdom’s (or the British Empire’s) outward-looking patriotism with the petty inward-looking nationalism which threaten it is an old argument – for over a century  the nationalist enemies of the empire and the union  were criticised for being illiberal, compared with the fair-minded, generous, multinational and multi-cultural Union and Empire.  This was a  very British conceit.  Today such a position is perverse. In the current conjuncture Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalisms (though not that of Ulster Unionists) are peculiarly internationalist. They stand in sharp contrast to the very nationalistic English nationalism of our time, and indeed the nationalistic British nationalism Theresa May, the Conservative Party and the DUP.

For all his claims for outward-looking UK-British patriotism, Brown has a very UK-national perspective. He writes of the ‘UK single market and customs union’, when he  knows that no such thing exists. There is an EU single market and customs union; the UK single market and customs union went in 1973 (strictly, a little later).  He condemns Scotland nationalists for wanting to leave this UK economy, when, as he also knows,  they want to stay in the EU. They also want the rest of the UK to stay in the EU.  It is of course the English and British nationalists (including Ulster Unionists) who want UKexit, and to create a ‘UK single market and customs union’.

Like many another British nationalist  Brown invokes a mythological account of the second world. The D-Day landings, were a  ‘sharp and moving reminder of what four nations have achieved together and why our Union must endure and matter for centuries to come’ he writes.  He went on: ‘Thousands upon thousands of English, Scots, Welsh and Irish soldiers are buried side by side in the cemeteries in the now-peaceful fields of Europe — together in death as they were in life. When they fought together, they did not check each other’s nationality before they stood shoulder to shoulder, bound by trust in the trenches, all for a common cause. It would mock their heroic sacrifices to wish the partition of a United Kingdom that they died to save.’  Yet he surely knows however that the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish soldiers lie in cemeteries established by the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission, not in United Kingdom ones.  In fact by 1944 British and Imperial troops were fighting not for Empire (much less the United Kingdom), but the United Nations.  And, as we should all know, D-Day and the Normandy campaign was fought by allied armies, with troops from the US, UK, Canada, France and Poland among others. 

Brown, the supposedly outward-looking British internationalist, shamelessly chooses to write out of history the empire, the wartime alliance, and the EU from his account of the United Kingdom.   In fact this is a new phenomenon, a modern invention of the years after the second world. This was a unique time in which the United Kingdom indeed existed as a coherent, economic and political and ideological unit.   For this period it does indeed make sense to speak of a national British economy (including a national customs union and single market), a national British army, a national British politics dominated by national, unionist parties.  Before 1945, and since the 1970s, things have been different.

The British national moment has long passed, the British nation has since the 1970s opened up to the world, and began to break up.   The greatest threat to the Union today comes not from the peripheral nationalisms, as Brown suggests, but a new unionist and mostly English and British nationalism, which in insisting on UKexit, is breaking  the very ground on which the politics of devolution is based.  Today Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalism are internationalist, and British nationalism, which cannot speak its name, only pretends to be internationalist.  British nationalism  is  living in a past in does not understand, invoking an earlier past which did not exist. Thus are the mighty fallen.

NO MORE CONCORDES? SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF BRITISH INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

I am of the generation that remembers the name Brian Trubshaw (Concorde’s British test pilot) and to whom it is obvious that Monty Python’s Flying Sheep sketch refers to Concorde, and that the Ministry of Silly Walks is the Ministry of Technology which supported it. After all the punch-line is ‘the Anglo-French Silly Walk, la Marche Futile!’.  But Concorde itself is hardly forgotten by younger people.  Concorde stands for a lot of things – the brilliance of British engineering, British delusions of grandeur, the uncommercial focus of British technology policy of the past. Interestingly it rarely stands for Anglo-French cooperation.  

The case of Concorde raises difficult questions which opponents and proponents of industrial and research strategy have had difficulty facing.  For that reason Concorde is a useful case to consider in order to get a better historical understanding of the realities of British industrial and innovation policy since 1945.

In the R&D policy literature Concorde is part of  big failure story.  In the literature dominant from the 1960s into the 1990s what needed to be explained was high R&D and low British growth in the years between 1945 and the 1960s and 1970s. The ‘British paradox’ Christopher Freeman called it.  His explanation, and that of many others, was that too much was spent on defence and on prestige projects, of which Concorde was a prime example, and not enough on bread and butter, commercially realisable innovation.  Germany and Japan were not so foolish and succeeded was the moral of this British misallocation model.  It was the dominant thesis drummed into every expert on British science policy into the 1990s.

There are two things wrong with the model. First, the assumption that more national R&D should lead to more national growth is not correct. In fact, for interesting, important and obvious reasons, national R&D was and is roughly inversely correlated with national rates of growth. Second, non-prestige, and non-defence R&D spending in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s was high, in fact higher than in Germany or Japan (let alone France or Italy). 

By the 1980s there was a very strong sense in the science policy community that the UK really needed to get its act together in innovation and make a really serious national effort to innovate in things which we knew would be important for the future.  A central part of the argument was that this had never happened before, partly because of  the supposed emphasis on prestige and defence.   The argument  was now extended to suggesting that there had never been an active industrial or technology policy. Instead the suggestion was that  research policy was left to scientists and their airy fairy ideas which went nowhere.   This was in effect another misallocation thesis –money had been handed over to the commercially witless research scientists who frittered it away on winning Nobel Prizes. To realise our potential we had to get real.

But this view was profoundly wrong too. Successive British governments really believed in the need to take a serious strategic view of British technological strength and to exploit it with commitment in order to secure the economic future of the nation.  From 1945 onwards there was a very serious attempt to transform the nation through innovation and industrial strategy.  We should not believe that ‘Keynesianism’ and the creation of the welfare state was as far as the state intervened.

The history of policy for the aircraft industry exemplifies this.  As far as the British state was concerned aviation was an industry of the future in which it was vital to be strong in.   Money and energy was poured in. The huge Brabazon – with 8 engines, the gigantic Princess flying boat – with 10 engines, the Britannia, the VC10 and the Concorde were most serious attempts to build big,  leapfrogging aeroplanes. No fewer than three were built by Bristol Aeroplane, in the same Brabazon Hangar, the largest open span building in Europe.  Four had Bristol engines.

And who was to say this was a bad idea? The UK was without question a pioneer in the jet engine – and was certainly ahead of the rest of the world in 1945, and beyond. This was not a lead to be squandered, especially not when the British aircraft industry was by far the largest and most technically capable in Europe.   

To return to Concorde.  In the light of this history Concorde can’t I think be seen merely as a prestige project. It was meant to be a ticket to the technological future, one which had to be bought for the nation to succeed.  

Aviation was not the only field in which the UK felt it was exploiting a national lead. This was also true of atomic power. In the 1950s the UK had in absolute and relative terms the largest civil nuclear power programme in the world, based on the Magnox reactors.  A second generation of reactors would follow from the 1960s when the UK boasted, correctly, that it had generated more nuclear electricity than any other country.  Again, the programme cannot be put down merely to prestige. Indeed both the aviation and nuclear programmes need to be understood in the frame of a wider vigorous techno-nationalist strategy which made the UK more industrial than it had ever been in its history, and transformed the infrastructure of the nation.

Techno-nationalism was an active,  expensive policy pursued by experts, technocrats perhaps,  with the future in their bones.  They believed that aviation and nuclear power were the future, and the future for Britain.  Like the technocrats of the present, who claim we must invest in biotech or batteries or AI, they insisted they knew the future.

Of course, not even technocrats know the future, even those celebrated for being ahead of their time.  What if supporting batteries or AI is just as much an unrealistic project as Concorde? Or perhaps  Concorde was in fact a plausible bet on the future?  What we can’t assume is that back then weird and wonderful notions of prestige ruled, but today we are hardnosed experts.

If anything went wrong in the past it was not, I suggest, a lack of ability to see the future, or lack of commitment, or even lack of consideration of economic benefits (for the economic benefits of Concorde were widely touted).  What was missing was enough of a consideration of alternatives, enough understanding of what was happening elsewhere in the world, and a lack of serious understanding of the uncertainties inherent in innovation.  And these problems are  just as bad today I think as in the 1960s. In fact they are worse, because the rest of the technological world is so much larger and important relative to the UK today compared to the 1960s. We are still pretending to pursue a delusional top dog innovation policy.

The history I give of British aviation above is not the conventional one. Most of the literature on the topic tells  a story of lack of commitment – a key book was called Project Cancelled.    The basic idea is that promising aeroplane after promising aeroplane was cancelled – the Martin Baker swept wing fighter; the V1000; the TSR2.  Yet the commitment is striking – the cancellations really came from overcommitment not under commitment. 

What we have difficulty coping with is the fact that commitment can lead to failure; we are to quick to see failure as evidence for lack of commitment.  We are also prone to forget success.  The aero-engine maker Rolls-Royce (which took over Bristol engines in the 1960s) is one of the very, very few cases of a world leading large still significantly British enterprise. It would not exist but for the strong support of the British state over decades, European military projects, and indirectly because of the existence and success of Airbus.  

The history I tell above makes no sense from another angle. If we think of political history of technology, and industrial strategy, we think of the White Heat, of Wilson’s Labour exceptional  but brief commitment to modernisation through technology, only to fail.   But there is a much richer story of the White Heat which is fully consistent with the story above. The White Heat programme of 1963/64 was based on the knowledge  that the state had indeed invested huge quantities and made huge efforts in technology and industry.  It was a programme of shifting away from projects which turned out dubious to more commercially viable ones. It was a critique of overcommitment to defence and to prestige projects.   In other words,  the White Heat policy was already, as a matter in theory, one of no-more Concordes.  The era of the White Heat was an era of increasingly clear scepticism about state high technology.  I think we need to learn from that scepticism, as much as from the policies which were actually pursued by the post-war United Kingdom.