Speaking Truth About British Power

It is a conceit of journalists and academics that we should speak truth to power. We should instead speak about power. Much of what is spoken about power is not true. Power knows the truth but does not usually need or want to speak it.  Power can even create truths. 

The politics of Brexit are a master class in creating truths. Its ideologues have confected for us an idea that they are  on a world-historical mission to put the United Kingdom back in it proper place in the world. The new truths are reaffirmed every day. With iron discipline the current Foreign Secretary and the Minister for International Trade have made speeches at the core of which was a grotesque misunderstanding of the UK’s place in the world. Penny Mordaunt asked the United States to choose between British free trade and EU and Chinese protectionism.  One after another Brexit negotiators resign, not to rethink but to double down on their claims for British strength. One has to admire the zeal.

The politics of Covid are another example of creating truths. The government repeatedly suggests waves of variants come from overseas, but are beaten back by British vaccine success, and thus that symbol of all that is good, the National Health Service, is saved.

These new truths work because they build on what we believe we know.  For decades we have heard that the UK punches above its weight, that Margaret Thatcher reversed the British decline, that we have a wonderfully competitive entrepreneurial economy. We know in our bones of the wonders of the NHS, and the successes of British pharma. Most of the British political class has been impressed by these claims. The truth machine has worked.

But the British truth machine does not work so well that it changes reality. After five years of Brexit and nearly two years of Covid the UK turns out not to have managed especially well.  Neither should have been surprises.

The Thatcher and subsequent governments did not managed to reverse the British decline, and the  UK economy is not now one of the top performing ones in the world. It might have looked that way from the City of London, but overall the economy grew less fast since 1979 than it did to 1979, and UK productivity is still behind that of Germany or France.  The world has changed greatly since 1979 in ways which have radically diminished the relative heft of the UK. The astonishing rise of China is the central case, but not the only one.   East Asian, Indian, European and the world economy as whole have grown more than the UK one, which has therefore shrunk in relative size. While the UK is a global economy, there are plenty of these in the world, and many have much more clout, not just the USA, but also China and Germany, let alone the EU as a whole. Today’s supposed global champion of free trade trades less. It has created a border in the Irish sea. British fishing has been destroyed, while the future of its agriculture has been sacrificed for headlines. Smaller nations trounce it in trade deals.  

For all the talk about the UK being a science superpower, not least in biosciences, and of the brilliant NHS, the melancholy truth is that British health outcomes were not especially good, and heavily influenced by class.  Covid death tolls and infection rates tell the same story.  All that early talk about a new Beveridge, the Blitz spirit, has faded like the hypocritical bad smell it was.  Even the vaccine success is not the most amazing in the world and depends, as does that of most countries, on supplies from the EU and the United States. The UK has been a large net importer of vaccines, while the EU has been a net exporter. There is an upside to this story which is that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is produced around the world for use overseas, mainly by and in India.

Recent decades have also shattered complacency about the effectiveness and legitimacy of the British state. It has hardly punched its weight in diplomacy and in the military.  After Iraq and Afghanistan, it is hardly possible for a serious analyst to maintain anything remains of a particular British military genius.   The Conservative party and the state has proved incapable of preparing for the Brexit it wanted. To cap it all it has lost legitimacy as never before, especially in Scotland and Ireland.  The civil service hasn’t covered itself in glory either, partying in Downing Street and various ministries while the rest of us obeyed the rules, and,  like the ministers it serves, staying on holiday in midst of crisis, and working with them to cover scandal up.

We should not take any of this lightly or comfort ourselves that this is a government of incompetents, sleazebags and hypocrites.  It is not their failings which are important, but what they aim to do, and their successes.  The Tories have increased their vote share in every election since 1997 and successfully transformed the UK through Brexit. They have installed themselves as a kind of British DUP, the hardest right government the UK has probably ever had.

But there are grounds for hope.  The Brexit revolution is not converting people to its cause, it does not mobilise the young, or workers, or business.  Supported mainly by the old, it has no positive basis in the everyday life of the economically active.  The Tory party is thus shackled to a failing policy, and a dying electorate, without the capacity even to make the best of a bad job, in hock to its right whose programme is denial of reality.

Reality is teaching important lessons about the limits of British power, the nature of the British economy and society and state.   It is from understanding these realities that a new progressive politics needs to be built.  A politics of real transformation needs to start from what we are: a large Canada, a small Germany, a tiny China.  It will seek to address big issues which require structural change to solve: grotesque inequality, the need to transform the economy to constrain climate change, and dealing with this pandemic and preparing for future ones.  It will be largely a matter of imitation, not innovation, and much will be driven by the rest of the world. Bigging up Britain, wrapped in the comfort blanket that is the Union Jack, will not help one bit.