Britain is facing a stark choice. So why are so many people tuning out?
As parliament tumbled through last week’s drama, I was in the north-west of England, trying to divine the public mood. (What we found is about to appear in the Guardian’s Anywhere But Westminster video series.) I spent a lot of time in Bury, the large town 12 miles to the north of Manchester whose two constituencies recently returned Labour MPs, although Bury North was held by the Tories between 2010-17. The previous year, 54% of voters in the wider metropolitan borough had supported Brexit.
Though it was not hard to find people whose belief in leaving the EU remains undimmed, the prevailing mood seemed to mix weariness with disconnection, and a sense that Westminster’s convulsions were just one more story of crisis and chaos. “I’m just confused,” one woman told me. “I’ve stopped watching any of it.” One man folded both the Brexit mess and the loss of his job as a refuse collector into a much wider story – of cuts to the borough council (which, since 2010, has lost 61% of its annual budget) and the collapse of Bury football club, a woeful example of a beloved local institution ruined by financial mismanagement and mountains of debt.
I recently wrote about people who might cheer on Boris Johnson’s constitutional vandalism and support Brexit at any cost. Their passions are mir
rored by those of furious remain voters, who have been energetically protesting not just in cities but an array of British towns. Yet the current condition of the country seems to also revolve around people and places that feel as if a particularly awful working week has somehow failed to end, and most of us simply want to switch off the lights and go home, wherever that is. This sense may yet define the imminent general election, which could be odd: the electorate being offered its starkest choice for decades and the media combusting with excitement, while millions of people look the other way.
Even if the three-year Brexit saga has tipped so many voters into a kind of exasperated torpor, the explanation for all this surely goes back much further, to the Thatcher years and the birth of a politics so fixated on change and “reform” that after four decades it has left people feeling absolutely knackered. As my time in Bury suggested, rather than thinking of a reckless, nodeal Brexit as an unprecedented bolt from the blue, it might be more instructive to see it as a national convulsion preceded by endless ideologically driven revolutions – first centred on the balance between the public and private sectors, then health, education, the benefits system and more. Most of them were comparably futile and ill-advised, and driven through with a similarly unthinking zeal. Moreover, instead of easing the turbulence created by a globalised capitalism whose new god was “disruption”, government policy long ago became a means of accelerating it.
Tony Blair advised the public to be “swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change”. In the wake of the 2008 crash, David Cameron whacked us with austerity, and then demanded we participate in something he called “the global race” – rhetorically, at least, the kind of haughty, borderline meaningless stuff that Tory Brexiteers have taken into the realms of absurdity.
And all the while a new political stereotype was taking root: that of the adviser who stalks the corridors of Whitehall, clutching Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and bemoaning the inertia of the government machine. First, those belligerent Blair-era insiders convinced that the Labour party had to embrace free markets and corporate power; then Cameron’s ridiculous barefooted guru; and now the increasingly infamous Dominic Cummings.
What combination of factors allowed such people to acquire their influence, and all this damage to happen? On the political left, there were too few strong voices making the case for equality – which is roughly where Jeremy Corbyn came in. On the right, the story of the last four decades is reducible to the demise of genuine conservatism, that tangle of beliefs resolutely sceptical of grand schemes, and romantically attached to a lost country of patrician kindness, family and community, and the rule of pragmatism. Its passing was symbolised by last week’s withdrawal of the Tory whip from old-style Conservatives such as Kenneth Clarke, Nicholas Soames and Rory Stewart – the last of whose run for the leadership was essentially this worldview’s final stab at influence in the party.
As the Conservative party chases unicorns and follows the orders of a leader who is apparently prepared to trample whatever gets in his way, now is a good time to dig out the famous quotation from the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who said that to be conservative was “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded”. Of course, this flattering description ignores the malignancies that lurked underneath: what some people call ruling-class interest, a belief in inequality and base prejudice as aspects of the natural order of things; the age-old Tory tendency to lash out at anyone who dares question the hierarchies that the party has always seen as underpinning national stability. I would no more vote for this kind of Toryism than I would for the current version. But it still strikes me as a creed that might eventually speak to a country that has been disrupted to death.
In the distant future, a reinvented conservatism might rediscover its lost reverence for this country’s conventions and institutions. It could emphasise the local over the national, and small over big business. Its proponents might suggest leaving teachers, doctors and nurses to do their jobs, as free from bureaucratic interference as entrepreneurs, and spurning huge infrastructure projects in favour of the protection or restoration of post offices, branch railway lines and sustainable town centres. At a push, I could even imagine a retrospective acknowledgement that if ever there was an example of the follies of an overmighty central state, it was what became of Brexit, and the spectacle of a few maniacs at the heart of government playing fast and loose with almost every aspect of our national life.
But where are we now, and what has modern Toryism given us? The prospect of the HS2 line, carving an increasingly expensive scar through rural England; the sell-off of Royal Mail and the destruction of so much of what holds places together by the worst kind of capitalism; schools so strangled by Whitehall edicts that their teachers don’t want to teach any more; a politics that cannot speak convincingly about “community” because it will not stop turning people against each other.
To cap it all, many Tories seem entirely relaxed about the breakup of the United Kingdom, the ultimate sacrifice in their headless pursuit of our divorce from Brussels. Clearly, they are locked into this deathly trajectory with no sign of any change of course. But maybe in 15 or 20 years’ time, amid the wreckage, they will look afresh at their own party’s name, and realise where it all went so wrong.
• John Harris is a Guardian columnist