Bonfire Night will be celebrated with fireworks across England tonight — and nowhere more dramatically than in Lewes, East Sussex. In an annual event that draws huge crowds, reportedly reaching some 40,000 participants last year, Lewes parades enormous effigies through the town before setting them alight.
These always include Guy Fawkes and Pope Paul V, in recognition of the foiled 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Fawkes and Paul V are joined every year by “Enemies of Bonfire”, usually topical figures from contemporary politics. Or, more precisely, from a roster of those perceived as villains by one particular “side” of contemporary politics.
Lewes is a prosperous, low-crime, not particularly diverse market town in the South-East, recently voted “one of the happiest” in Britain. It is commuting distance from both Brighton and London. Its residents skew older, and voted Liberal Democrat at the last election. So it’s perhaps to be expected that the “Enemies of Bonfire” often look like a Who’s Who of Guardian hate-figures: recent years have included Nigel Farage, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. But if there’s a distinctive political flavour to Lewes’ “Enemies of Bonfire”, perhaps this fits with what the festival always marked: a temporary victory for one side in a bitter culture war where — for a long time — compromise was simply impossible.
If we’ve since largely forgotten the details, this is for the happy reason that eventually the politics became (for the most part) less bitter. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so complacent. Many of the underlying drivers of 17th-century England’s political turbulence have echoes in the world around us today. Then, as now, the atmosphere was febrile. An information revolution was transforming the country’s economy, culture and ideology. Some were looking toward opportunities in the New World, while others argued over how close England’s bonds to the Continent ought to be.
Back then, all these disparate issues snowballed into two increasingly irreconcilable ideological poles — and, eventually, into the open conflict of the Civil War — before one side eventually emerged victorious. And today, as I consider the angry, fractious place my country has become, I can’t help wondering: how much longer will the attempted murder of an entire government go on feeling sufficiently remote, as a prospect, to make a safe, fun theme for an autumn party?
It might be tempting, at this juncture, to make a facile point about bombs and Islam. But while Islamist attacks pose a genuine threat today, comprising the lion’s share of contemporary counterterrorism work in the UK, it would be anachronistic to call the Gunpowder Plot terrorism in this sense. As Jean Baudrillard has argued, modern terrorism is as much a phenomenon of mass media as of violence: its impact lies not just in the violence, but also in its media reproduction as spectacle. Guy Fawkes had a much blunter and more straightforward aim, which was to assassinate James I and his entire government, before (as most believe) replacing James, a Protestant, with his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, so as to use her as a puppet to restore Catholic rule to England.
As for today, I don’t think anyone is literally plotting to blow up Britain’s government. But I do think it’s telling that a poll conducted last year revealed Reform voters are more sympathetic than any other group to Guy Fawkes. Among this group, 55% were favourable to Fawkes and only 22% unfavourable, while supporters of other parties were much more evenly divided. And if we take “blowing up Parliament” figuratively, rather than literally, this makes perfect sense.
“Reform voters are more sympathetic than any other group to Guy Fawkes”
It’s hardly original to note that British politics has been in a state of increasingly bitter deadlock for at least a decade, as trench warfare grinds on between those who believe nations should be sovereign and democratically self-governing, and those who believe in a post-political, post-national “rule of law”. And there’s a precedent: if Brexit brought this wrangling into the open in 2016, the polarisation that impelled Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot in 1605 also began with a Brexit of sorts, when Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1534.
At the time, the Reformation was spreading across Europe, and technological and economic changes were beginning to cascade. All was enabled, and intensified, by an information revolution: the printing press. But it wasn’t that Henry VIII was a religious radical. He never stopped viewing himself as Catholic, and these moves were more about political expediency than conviction. But others felt more strongly. Religious and political tensions soon became difficult to disentangle, especially when amplified by the politics of national interest.
By the time Henry’s daughter Elizabeth I died in 1603, bringing James I to the throne, printed maps had revolutionised international exploration, and the European scramble for empires was well under way. During Elizabeth’s reign, imperial rivalry between England and Catholic Spain was fierce. For many, Catholics looked perilously like foreign fifth columnists; meanwhile, among more ordinary English folk, spreading literacy meant intensifying religious sectarianism. Taken all together, set against new demands for political power from an expanding mercantile elite, these pressures contributed to an intensifying sense of crisis in the model of governance itself, that we could perhaps summarise with two questions: who rules, and on whose moral authority?
For Henry VIII, the answer to those questions had been “Me, and mine”. But by Guy Fawkes’ era, the answer was increasingly contested. Seen in this context, his plot seems less revolutionary than mournfully reactionary. He wanted to return, perhaps even retvrn, to a Catholic monarchy: in effect, to reset England to the religious and political order that preceded Henry VIII’s religious and constitutional upheavals.
We can perhaps understand Reform’s recent restorationist policy proposals as a similar (in this case, we must hope, only figuratively incendiary) attempt at reset. For if there is something familiar about the early 17th-century landscape of information revolution, competing elite factions, ideological polarisation, and metapolitical wrangling, that’s because we’re there again. Just this time, the information revolution is digital. And if 55% of Reform supporters approve of Guy Fawkes, and perhaps dream of (metaphorically) blowing up Parliament, this expresses a now explosively pent-up public frustration resulting from the first modern attempt to respond to this new revolution: Tony Blair’s constitutional changes.
New Labour was nothing if not prescient. As early as 1998, Peter Mandelson was predicting the end of “pure representative democracy” in favour of new, perhaps digitally-mediated forms of political participation. So even if Blair’s constitutional fiddling is viewed today as a factor in our current political paralysis, perhaps the most charitable read of its intent is as a sincere if wrong-headed effort to “modernise” an order Blair accurately assessed as hopelessly ill-equipped for the information age. The problem, as it turned out, was that his solution made everything worse, replacing a sclerotic and unresponsive democracy with even more sclerotic and unresponsive managerialism.
In response, Farage promises we can retvrn. Back in August, for example, he announced a range of measures to tackle illegal immigration into Britain, so many of which are impossible under the Blairite regime that even attempting them presupposes retooling the engine of government. Accordingly, Reform recently followed up with a still more comprehensive programme for doing so: Danny Kruger MP laid out plans for reforming Whitehall and restoring parliamentary sovereignty: in effect, a controlled demolition of the Blairite revolution.
Will it work? If we take the Guy Fawkes analogy literally, the signs are not good. Those who celebrate tonight with bonfires and fireworks do so, after all, because Fawkes failed. On the evening of 4 November, based on an anonymous tip-off, officials searched the vaults under Parliament, and discovered 36 barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes and his co-conspirators were hanged, drawn, and quartered.
But that was far from an end to the era’s upheavals. In fact, it was more like the beginning. Over the reigns of James and then his son Charles, the question of who rules, and on whose authority, grew so conflicted that by 1642 the country dissolved into chaotic civil conflict. This was followed by a decade of military dictatorship, and finally the restoration of Charles II — but even then it wasn’t over. There were further plots and upheavals, including at one point an attempt by a faction in Parliament to legislate the Catholic heir apparent out of the line of succession.
All was only settled when the Jacobite line was deposed, in favour of William of Orange. As well as being a Protestant, William was also happy to enjoy a regency that was largely defanged and symbolic rather than absolute. And with this, the question “who rules, and on whose authority?” was resolved as, respectively, “the House of Commons” and “a constitutional monarch who is Supreme Governor of the Church”. England, and later the United Kingdom, and thereafter the British Empire, thrived under some version or other of this settlement from 1688 until the 20th century.
If things feel grim and chaotic today, it’s because that settlement is now exhausted and ineffective — surely, in part, as Mandelson anticipated, thanks to the digital revolution. New Labour tried to get ahead of this by “modernising” us into a post-democratic managerial age governed by human rights, judicial reviews, and all the extra-democratic rest of it. In other words, to answer those two questions respectively as “technocrats” and “universal human rights”. And it worked well enough, for some, for a while. Its beneficiaries cluster, for example, in prosperous towns such as Lewes, where they can symbolically burn the enemies of managerialism undisturbed by dissenting perspectives.
But while I commend Reform’s impulse to end our managerial paralysis, it’s an open question whether Parliamentary sovereignty will be the hoped-for solution. Even among those who hate the Blairite order, who still believes the old one can save us? Who can look at Charles III, let alone his crapulent younger brother, and see a flourishing constitutional monarchy? As TikTok nibbles at our attention spans and capacity to read, and MPs are accused of getting ChatGPT to write their speeches, who can believe unquestioningly that restoring Parliamentary sovereignty will on its own deliver improved public trust, or indeed functioning governance?
If the 17th century is any guide, we’ll just have to keep grinding through the options until we find a resolution everyone can live with. I hope this time it doesn’t take a whole century, or produce (as some pessimistically predict) civil war. For what it’s worth, my hunch is that resetting the Blairite revolution will ultimately fail, just as the Catholic restorationists failed. But also that, when the dust finally settles, we will find, as we did previously, that a revolution has in fact occurred. I think it at least possible that the resulting order will more closely resemble the England that ended in 1688 than the “Modern Britain” bestowed upon us by Tony Blair.
