I wish I’d bothered to learn more poetry when I was younger so that I could think beyond Yeats’s done-to-death “Second Coming” when musing about British politics right now. Perhaps in 2018 it is better explained in meme form, as the dog in the burning house muttering “This is fine,” or the sweating man forced to choose between two buttons: “Renege on Referendum Promises” and “Destroy the Economy and Tory Party.”
After close to 200 years of existence, the Conservative party in Britain might finally be breathing its last, bitterly torn in two over Europe. The European Research Group, led by the aristocratic, traditionalist Catholic, father-of-six Jacob Rees-Mogg, openly speaks of betrayal following Prime Minister Theresa May’s compromise proposal earlier this month. The party’s smaller group of Europhile MPs talk of a government of national unity alongside centrist Labor members (among these “wet” Tories is the aristocratic Nicholas Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill).
Labor, meanwhile, is split into three factions: the pro-Brussels socially liberal majority, the hard Left (who have captured the leadership and are Euroskeptics, but for entirely different reasons), and the party’s pro-Brexit social conservatives (who account for only 2 MPs but still speak for a large—though shrinking—number of Labor supporters).
The two-party system that has endured for a century appears to be crumbling and the 2016 Brexit referendum revealed how shallow many people’s philosophical base actually was.
The Left doesn’t care for democracy. Indeed the Guardian recently published a piece criticizing the universal franchise, while the Right is perfectly happy to wreck the country’s finances to win an argument. Or to “Own the Libs,” as they say these days. One of the most disconcerting things, from a conservative point of view, is watching so many of my political co-religionists turn into Maoists, intent on radicalism and revolution, interested only in distant, vague prospects of a better future and blind to the immediate, far larger, chances of catastrophe.
Conservatism is by nature averse to risks and is based on the principle that huge, radical changes are almost by definition unwise, whatever direction they take. And while the Leave vote was a gamble, the “hard Brexit” version being called for by Tory rebels looks like Russian roulette with five bullets in the cylinder.
Polarization tends to develop its own momentum, and what was off the table even two years ago now seems mainstream. There was always a Tory strain of Euroskepticism but it crystallised in the late 1980s with growing centralization and the onward rush of the Maastricht Treaty which, in 1993, turned the European Community into the European Union. Back then, hostility was largely directed towards political aspects of the E.U., the principal gripe being that Britain had meant to join a “Common Market,” not a super-state. Which was true enough. Back then, the Euroskeptics merely wanted a new relationship, as Liam Fox said in 2012, “one based on an economic partnership involving a customs union and a single market in goods and services.”
Just six years later the same Liam Fox now calls such an arrangement a “betrayal”—and he’s certainly not the only one who’s hardened his stance. Some of us nervously supported Leave on the understanding that a Conservative party, led by fairly intelligent people, would lead us into a “soft” Brexit, accepting that it was not possible to reverse much international harmonization and that we would have to accept many of the standards laid down in Brussels in order to avoid tariffs and barriers.
These rules certainly reduce democratic accountability and national sovereignty. But the economic costs of exiting them would be staggering. Yet we seem to have been left behind as things fall apart and Tory Leavers propose a Brexit far harder than anything imagined in 2016.
Euroskepticism in the Tory party only grew with the 1990 political assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Europhiles. Like Obi Wan Kenobi, this made her stronger than ever, forging a cult of betrayal and a determination by the Tory “bastards” (as her successor John Major called them) that they would get revenge.
But some Euroskeptics saw the party as inevitably compromised and formed instead a number of tiny, fringe groups to continue the fight against Brussels. Only months after Thatcher’s removal a Liberal party-supporting academic named Alan Sked founded the Anti-Federalist League. In 1993 this group renamed itself the United Kingdom Independence Party. UKIP, as they eventually became known, were not even the largest anti-E.U. movement in Britain at the time, that honor going to James Goldsmith’s Referendum party. In the 1997 general election UKIP received only 0.1 per cent of the vote.
That election ushered in Tony Blair, and with him 4 million immigrants to an island which, until the Second World War, had experienced only tiny trickles of people over the previous millennium. Immigration was soon running at 500,000 a year, in many places radically altering the demography of towns that had never experienced such change, even with the first wave of post-war, Commonwealth migration in the 1950s and ’60s.
Much of Labor’s motivation was financial, for indeed the great bulk of evidence does point to free movement being an economic bonus. But there were also cultural, emotional, and ideological motivations: Multiculturalism was exciting and progressive; diversity was the future; restrictions or barriers were racist and sinful. The Blairites insisted that the problems associated with multicultural societies—those of political division, conflict and mistrust, what Enoch Powell called “the haunting tragedy of the United States”—could all be overcome and were little more than the hang-up of a shrinking number of moral failures.
I wrote a book about all of this, the gist of which was that the Blairite view of mass immigration was an essentially utopian idea, and that hoping groups of people would happily share a country was as deluded as the communist belief that people might happily share possessions: “As diversity increases, democracy weakens. Faith in democracy declines when people see that they cannot make a difference, and mass immigration, a policy clearly and consistently opposed by most people and yet which no mainstream politician will speak against, has shaken the public’s trust in politics. Since politicians will not listen to people’s concerns, they come to the conclusion that politics is pointless.”
Large numbers of 1997 Labor voters simply dropped off the radar afterwards, absent from polling booths until 19 years later. Indeed New Labor’s great social experiment was unpopular from the start, with public concern about the issue of migration rising in tandem with actual immigration numbers, contrary to widespread assumptions that the public are ill-informed or simply whipped up by the media. (Although in every country people’s perception about how many migrants there actually are is wildly out).
And so UKIP began to find a new function. Today in Britain people associate the rising salience of immigration in the 2000s with the huge, sudden arrival of Poles and other central Europeans late in 2004, yet under Blair, E.U. migration only accounted for a minority, as little as a quarter of the total. White Poles, working mainly in service jobs where they had a great deal of contact with Britons, were paradoxically more visible than the many south Asian brides who were able to come here after Labor relaxed family migration rules, slipping into increasingly segregated urban areas in London, the midlands, and the north.
UKIP’s big breakthrough came in the June 2004 European elections, only weeks after Poland’s accession, when they increased their seat total from 2 to 12 and won over 15 percent of the vote. It was largely a response to non-E.U. migration, which had already visibly increased since 1997. In the summer of 2001 there were race riots across the north of England, and after September 11, concerns about Islamic extremism rose and accelerated even further after the Tube attacks in 2005. By then the large numbers of white immigrants arriving had, to a certain extent, de-racialized the issue and so what had once been the subject “no one was allowed to talk about” became almost tediously ubiquitous.
Previous to Blair, UKIP had been a small and eccentric band of Thatcherite free-market enthusiasts, but the party soon managed to carve out a niche as a relatively non-toxic anti-migration movement. It became increasingly lower-middle and working class and so moved away from libertarianism, adopting a more national conservative ideology. At the 2014 Euro elections the party finished at the top, winning over 26 percent of the vote, and a panicked David Cameron promised a referendum on E.U. membership.
Although most Leave supporters cited “sovereignty” as their reason for voting, they would have come nowhere near 52 percent without the issue of immigration, helped along by the E.U.’s complete inflexibility on the subject of free movement between its 28 member states. The Vote Leave slogan, “Take Control,” carried with it an implicit concluding phrase “of our borders.” And yet, ironically, UKIP voters were far less agitated by continental Europeans arriving than they were by migration from the developing world. Which was a view that both Remainers and Leavers agree on, in fact.
Along with Jamaicans, for whom Britons have a sentimental attachment, Poles are among the most popular immigrant group in Britain. Even in very “leavey” English seaside towns people say the same thing about the Poles: hard-working, beer-drinking people “just like us.”
This is not just white people favouring other white people (although that probably plays a part). Migrants from western, and to a lesser extent eastern, Europe are far more beneficial to the British economy than those from poorer countries. There are such huge variances is economics, values, and social-customs between the nationalities that talking about immigrants as a single bloc is actually quite meaningless.
The social costs of European migration are reasonably low; the Polish influx will not lead to second-generation Catholic radicals, or ghettos, or gang problems made difficult to address because of racial politics, or a costly integration and diversity industry—never mind the unsettling and alien cultural practices such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation.
By most measures Polish migration in Britain has been quite successful. But even here there are perfectly valid objections: Many people in trades, for instance, quite reasonably view Polish immigrants as economic rivals, funneled into Britain by a heartless ruling class in order to push down working class wages. And it was objections such as these which drove the Leave campaign over the top. As John Lydon of the Sex Pistols put it afterwards, “the working class have spoken.” Indeed the Brexit vote was probably the biggest display of British working class muscle since 1945 when Winston Churchill was booted out in a Labor landslide.
The working class have also taken control of the Conservative party. In a great historical twist, the Brexit vote transformed the Tories into the Brexit party by drastically realigning their voting base.In 2010 the Tories won 30 percent of voters from social classes C2D; today the Tories polls a bit higher than 42 percent in that demographic. And on the other side of the ledger, the party has lost a huge number of middle-class, liberal “Remainers.” Possibly forever.
As of last year Prince William’s Kensington Palace home is represented by a Labor MP for the first time in history. Meanwhile Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, described by D.H. Lawrence as an “utterly disheartening colliery town” and solidly Labor since 1923—they won close to 70 percent in 1997—is now a Tory seat. The low tax, laissez-faire party of Margaret Thatcher has been killed off by the Euroskeptic cult that surrounded her.
And now the Tory right is prepared to split the party and hand Downing Street to the socialist Jeremy Corbyn while also risking the potential economic catastrophe of a hard Brexit. And all in order to cut the sort of immigration that Britons worry about least. Good show.
All the while non-E.U. migration—the type that concerns people the most and led to the growth of UKIP—has gone up.
All for an ideal of free trade outside the E.U. and a return to pre-globalization sovereignty, that seems wildly utopian and, well, un-conservative.
But at least they’ll get to own the Libs.
