Only a year ago, the soft-Left establishment commentariat who make up what remains of the Labour Party’s constituency exultantly heralded the incoming government as a new dawn of political order. “Just having a stable government who will be there for five, maybe ten years,” Andrew Marr sagely told the Question Time audience, meant that “for the first time in many of our lives, actually Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability.” A year on, we find Marr writing of his fears of “uncontrollable community tension or, to put it more bleakly, race war”. As Marr warns, “This is a genuinely perilous moment for social democracy. I hope it’s not too much for the struggling government we have, but I worry.”
It took only 12 months, the life-span of a shrew, for a Labour landslide to transmute itself into a struggling government barely able to contain social cataclysm. If a country’s stability can be measured in the longevity of its leaders, then Britain remains in a period of near-revolutionary ferment. Who can say with confidence that Starmer, Britain’s sixth Prime Minister in a decade, will see out his full term, or even that his party will?
At the time of writing, with the Chancellor weeping on the front bench, and Starmer’s authority within his own party having followed his welfare reforms down the drain, the Labour government reeks of approaching death. Already almost as unpopular as the Conservative Party at its terminal nadir in government, Labour is in office without power, in helpless possession of a historic majority it cannot use and is unlikely ever to repeat.
Yet for all that Starmer is simply a dud, the Government’s root problem is structural rather than personal: any Labour replacement would suffer the same fate. All the recent character portraits released to mark his dismal anniversary, peering behind the hollow mask, are thus an exercise in futility. The reason Britain is cycling through prime ministers at an ever-increasing rate is due to a crisis of state legitimacy. Like later 19th-century Ireland, the effective governance of the country has now become impossible. The state’s legitimacy and reach are contested, neither oppression nor mollification are practicable, an amorphous nationalist revolt is brewing, and strategic shocks are appreciable on the horizon.
In an attempt to borrow the legitimacy of existential threat, the state warns darkly of an approaching war it is not equipped to fight, in defence of a political order no one would willingly fight for. The country is simply in no state to fight a war. According to Westminster’s own newly announced commission on social cohesion, the UK is now a “tinderbox” of “creeping balkanisation and extremism” in which “the basis of our democracy is at risk”. Yet as the commission itself laments, “We do not have a national era-shaping presidential figure such as Lee Kuan Yew or Charles de Gaulle” to remake the faltering state. What we have, for now, is Keir Starmer.
One highly probable outcome of the current crisis, according to the New Statesman’s Tom McTague, is that Starmer “will be remembered as the last leader of the old normal, the final defender of the shaky post-2008 world before it was dragged into a new state by the figures now jockeying for mastery of the populist right”. Yet whatever the contours of the new state, the Westminster state, in its current ailing form, is also a very recent one: the proof of this is that even a return to the Britain of John Major would be experienced as a political revolution, condemned as fascism by clients of the Blairite state. Blair’s New Labour effectively erected a new UK polity on Britain’s territory, a “New Britain” in his own words, to entirely reshape what had by the Nineties become a normal European nation state for a new globalised world order. Yet now that global order has collapsed, and the British state reshaped in its image lives on borrowed time.
“Britain remains in a period of near-revolutionary ferment.”
The unintentional effect of Blair’s demographic and constitutional tinkering was to set in train a second, later counterrevolution on the Right, understood by its opponents as a Right-wing populism of base urges, rather than a logical and entirely predictable political reaction. The current political trends on the Right are most closely analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries, one of the essential stages of political modernity which Britain, through its possession of an early unified state and global empire, had previously sidestepped. Once you accept the analogy with classical nationalism, you see its hallmarks everywhere. The increasing co-option of the Conservative Party and its allied media and thinktanks by the New Right follows precisely the same process of “blocked mobility”, producing a revolutionary counter-elite among disaffected graduates that the scholar John Hutchinson traced in his works on cultural nationalism. In this regard, we may note that the current UK state’s proscription of “cultural nationalism” as a threat to its survival is entirely rational. Late 19th-century Ireland is one useful parallel, but others are available, as the relationship follows a well-worn historical path. In his 1994 book Modern Nationalism, Hutchinson summarised the process by which the ethnic Russians of the Soviet Union lost faith in their state, and by withdrawing its legitimacy, allowed it to collapse.
Like his contemporary Blair, Gorbachev aimed to reshape his ailing state for the brave new world of the Nineties. Instead, he accelerated its collapse. Following his failed reforms, ethnic Russians “came to believe themselves victims of a failed system… declining in world prestige and economically incompetent” in which the heterogenous state built around their ethnic core instead appeared to be the engine of their demographic decline. Relative birth rates, of ethnic Russians and minorities, assumed new political importance as “concerns were expressed about demographic trends which were transforming them into a minority in the Union”, while a new flowering of overt anti-Russian sentiment among minorities heightened their alienation from the Soviet state. The growing centrality of demographic and cultural anxieties in an atmosphere of economic decline and paralysed political leadership accelerated a Russian “ambivalence that made them prepared in the end to desert the USSR in order to build a better future in their homelands. Divisions paralysed the state, paving the way for full collapse.” In 1986, Hutchinson reminds us, the Soviet leadership had declared the “national question” to be finally resolved: five years later, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
How relevant is this scenario to the UK? Each day’s headlines now throw up correspondences, yet what is remarkable, and tragic, is how new these dynamics are. Writing in 1994, Hutchinson observed that there are a few “other multinational states where the core nationality exercises power through a civic rather than an ethnic identification”, with Britain being the prime example. Yet the Britain of the Nineties differed from the Soviet Union in that “the core nationality is much more dominant than were the Russians in the USSR (who had declined to barely 50 per cent of the total population) and there are many fewer minority nationalities to control”. The takeaway lesson, for Hutchinson, is that “even universalistic ideologies such as communism, possessing all the machinery of a modern technological state to achieve its aims, have ultimately to operate through ethnic core populations.” Indeed, “for a state to achieve stability… these cores must be demographically dominant and strongly identified with the state and its territories.” This social-scientific truism is increasingly the pivot of British politics.
Just as Gorbachev’s failed reforms accelerated processes which “encouraged many Russians to redefine the Soviet territory as alien and to identify the Russian territory as their homeland,” we see a similar process on the rapidly evolving British Right in distinguishing between the Britain of recent memory and its UK replacement. When even Tory grandees such as Lord Frost borrow the disparaging term “Yookay” from the internet Right to disparage what he defines as Blair’s “new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain [but] distinct from it”, we see a similar, explicit distinction being made as that between Russia and the USSR. The counterpoint to Blair’s UK, or YooKay — the two are, now, more or less interchangeable — is, as Frost observes, simply Britain.
Whether you welcome this development or fear it, British politics in its current tumultuous form, with all its increasingly radicalised and existential debates on immigration and demographics, on its history, social housing and the welfare state, and on the nature and boundaries of Britishness or Englishness, is inexplicable without accepting that the country has now entered this phase of political development. Almost every daily headline or “culture war” controversy strengthens this thesis, which requires a wilful blindness to ignore: indeed, it is now more vigorously heard in ordinary life, or seen in the comments of local news stories than it in the Westminster press. In rushing towards visions of civil war, social democrats such as Marr, just like his increasingly mainstream apocalyptic analogues on the Right, have skipped the more common and plausible political outcome of political pressures leading towards a reinvigorated, more tightly-defined nation state, as historically distinct in its own way as Eastern Europe’s transition from communism.
McTague’s portrait of Starmer as “the last leader of the old normal” may be better applied to Farage, a flawed politician seemingly destined to take on a daunting and unenviable historical role. When Farage can declare that “Those who try to demonise me could be in for a terrible shock once I’m gone. That’s why we say we believe that we are the last chance to restore confidence in the democratic system, to change things”, he is probably correct. Whether he is up to the challenge is doubtful. As its name suggests, the Reform Party can be understood as one of the last attempts of the old system — the UK state in its post-Blair form — to save itself. If the analogies with classical nationalism are valid, then the political horizon of interest is what comes after Reform’s likely failure in government, as some on the political Right increasingly make explicit. Rupert Lowe’s new cross-party venture, Restore Britain, is a more perfect summation of nationalist thinking.
As the most intellectually interesting politician on the Right, Robert Jenrick, declares, “The old order is collapsing — and its architects like Tony Blair are yesterday’s men and women… We live in a political interregnum” in which “we have no choice but to go advance, and embrace the new order that is coming.” Cynically or not, consciously or not, Jenrick is tapping into the ferment of nationalist ideas on the younger Right, as is a growing cohort of the Conservative Party under Badenoch’s hands-off leadership. We have entered a well-established and predictable historical process which is likely to reshape the British state entirely before it is done. Indeed, it is notable that one eyewitness observer of the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, Dominic Cummings, has already himself transitioned from reformer to accelerationist. Others will surely follow: adapting the old Irish nationalist maxim, we can say that the UK’s crisis is Britain’s opportunity.
Yet despite the weakness of lobby journalists for vapid gossip, the individual personalities of Westminster politicians thrown up by the moment are in a sense irrelevant, making Starmer, the empty cipher, the perfect figure of our time. Like Starmer, buffeted by winds he cannot control, their positions are structural, created by the logic of events. Like us mere voters, the politicians of today and of the near future have been dragged into the slipstream of history, in a process they may not fully perceive and cannot fully control. To accurately outline the contours of the current crisis is one thing: but where it all leads, no-one can yet say.
