English Nationalism in an Absurd Election

First off, this was a very English occasion.  Not British.  The map at left shows an overwhelmingly Tory England at odds with at least two of the other three nations of the United Kingdom.  Scotland may be gone by the end of Boris Johnson's five-year term. Northern Ireland, I think, will slowly realign with the Republic of Ireland in an island federation with capitals in both Dublin and Belfast.  Johnson may be the "one nation" UK's last prime minister.

Second, Labour's demolition in the UK election under social democrat Jeremy Corbyn does not mean that US Democrats should run to the pro-business center.  Roger Cohen et al. are wrong about this--and it will be really great of American liberals not to channel Steve Bannon's spin about a Brexit wave sweeping the globe.  In the main exit poll, voters who didn't vote Labour blamed Labour "leadership" rather than its "economic policies"--by a margin of nearly 4 to 1.  Among Labour voters who defected to the Tories, that margin was 9 to 1.  The share casting conscious votes against nationalization or infrastructure development or renewable energy or pension increases stayed in the single digits.  Labour's defeat was not a defeat of green democratic socialism as an increasingly popular project.

So if the working-classes weren't voting against socialism, what the hell happened?  Union leader Len McCluskey blamed Brexit, meaning Labour would have won if it had competed with Boris Johnson to be more pro-Brexit? I really don't think so.  This theory doesn't explain the tragic fact noted by a Labour MP from Birmingham, Jess Phillips, who wrote,

The more working-class a constituency was, the worse the result was for Labour. The problem isn’t just that working-class people will be hurt by the Tories – it’s that too many don’t believe we’re better than the Tories.

The hard question is why do working-class people who've been hurt for nine years by Tory austerity think that Labour is as bad as the Tories?  It's not like the US in 2016, where a representative of the New Democrats, Hillary Clinton, could be blamed by Obama-to-Trump voters for neoliberal policies that offshored jobs, deregulated banking, and watched millions lose their homes.  Corbyn was staunchly opposed to New Labour and to Tory austerity, and could hardly be accused of being a Tory enabler.

So it was something about Jeremy? Phillips almost gets there, but wanders off into complaints about intolerance in the party leadership towards dissent, which was a problem for MPs but not obviously for voters. 

Similarly, Lisa Nandy, an MP from outside Manchester, accused her party of not listening to people enough.  But again, even if Labour MPs like her were not listening a whole lot more than Tory MPs don't listen, which I strongly doubt, she doesn't say what better-listening MPs would have heard. It's not clear what policies would have mattered, since Labour has been out of power for nearly a decade, and it's the Tories that have run the government and squeezed every council budget and every public service in the country.  Perhaps local Labour officials did crap jobs in working-class constituencies that Labour lost--I wouldn't know. But it makes no sense that people hurt by explicit Tory policies don't hold the Tories responsible for the damage they are famously resentful about.

This is a map from the BCC coverage showing constituencies that changed hands.  In England, nearly all went to the Conservatives (in blue; yellow is the Scottish National Party, and orange the Liberal Democrats).

I'm struck by that middle belt from west to east, which corresponds to the "Northern Powerhouse" whose overstuffed, clunky trains, tattered NHS clinics, and generally neglected services have been famously not improved by the Tories over their decade in power.  So where was "vote the rascals out"?  In fact, a bad ten years was rewarded with another five--in part by austerity's leading victims.

This was not a close election. An Observer editorial summarized the scale of the Tory win.

This is the largest Conservative majority the country has seen since 1987, delivered on the biggest share of the vote won by any party since Margaret Thatcher’s first victory in 1979. For Labour, this defeat is its fourth in a row, producing the smallest cohort of MPs the party has seen since 1935. Britain’s electoral map has been upended as the Conservatives have swept to victory with a raft of seats in the north and the Midlands that were not so long ago seen as impregnable Labour strongholds.

England went whole-hog Tory, with the exception of the London city-state.

Were voters duped by the Tory press?  I'm not a fan of dupe theory: if a Labour voter was going to vote for Corbyn but switches after following a Facebook link to an Evening Standard headline about his "red plan for Britain," she wasn't a Labour voter. Dupe theory begs the question of why people are "duped."  People also don't enjoy being tricked.  They didn't vote for the victory of the "bullshit-industrial complex."  Nor did they hope for Boris Johnson to "extract a dangerous lesson from his win: that putting out untrue claims about your opponents, blaming them for events that happen on your watch, and avoiding scrutiny at all costs is an effective political strategy."

So back to leadership: I would like to know why Corbyn wasn't a "leader" even to traditional Labour voters.

His handling of the anti-Semitism charges did real damage.  A couple of my (working-class) neighbors in Islington have dwelt upon it.  The charge is very serious-- and yet it feels to me more like a screen for a deeper misgiving about Corbyn overall.  The party went through a constantly scrutinized investigation, but it produced no findings and served mostly to keep the charges alive. Corbyn and some other Labourites are certainly opposed to Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza toward Palestinians, but voters need to have reasons not to see or care about the difference between that and anti-Semitic policies or beliefs.

Corbyn also made a massive leadership mistake in not coming out for or against Brexit. He was swept into party leadership by his reputation for principled integrity, clarity, and consistent political values.  When he equivocated on the main issue of his time as party leader, he threw away his reputation for integrity.  When he spoke, he became evasive and hard to understand.  He could have campaigned for Socialist Remain and tried to persuade his Brexit base, or on the other hand promoted an exciting and coherent Lexit. He did neither, for whatever reasons, and threw away his main credential as a political figure.

But the real problem is the English electorate.  The vote seems to me driven by English nationalism, damn the social consequences.  This involves seeing the country as still-exceptional and innately great, in spite of its current condition.  It also demands never criticizing the evil outcomes that have gone with its imperial history.  Corbyn's career revolved around criticizing those outcomes, as he was a confirmed anti-imperalist who opposed state policies in Palestine and Ireland, among others, that were endorsed by the English establishment.  His leadership failure was a "failure of patriotism." In contrast, Johnson advanced himself as the new Churchill.  This evoked the England of World War II and of imperial glory, not of Montbatten the Last Viceroy in India or the Suez defeat or Britain declining slowly as it passive-aggressively decolonized.  Corbyn was not the person who would tout English good intentions or English successes in those nationalist missions.  Thus he was distrusted or even despised by all sorts of English people, working-classes much included.

English nationalism is also a white nationalism.  I'm surprised at the lack of mainstream discussion this weekend of the anti-immigrant motive behind Brexit, and of Islamophobia.  The election took place on the 13th day after the London Bridge knife attacks, in which Usman Khan killed two people before being chased by the public and then shot dead by police.  The victims were two University of Cambridge graduates who worked with a prison education program called Learning Together, which was having a meeting in a facility near the bridge.  Formerly incarcerated people were in attendance, including at least one who tried to hold Khan off. Khan was himself formerly incarcerated, convicted of terrorist offenses in 2012: how he wound up at Learning Together, killing two people working with the currently and formerly incarcerated, beggars belief.  The victims were both white; the father of one, Dave Merritt, tried to keep his son's death from being used to stoke anti-Islamic sentiment for political gain, and publicly accused Boris Johnson of doing exactly that.  But the sides were quietly drawn: it was easy, for example, to find coverage of Khan's story that tied "the terrorist's UK-based family" to Pakistan.  It was also easy to vote silently for a de facto anti-Islam and anti-immigrant ticket that needn't actually speak its name.

A further dimension is England's economic nationalism, which may have once been dragged into supporting public transportation, housing, health, education, telecom, and the other publicly-funded foundations of the modern private sector, but which now looks for living incarnations of Keynes's "animal spirits." Johnson routed Corbyn in the contest for "a spontaneous urge to action" which sweeps all obstacles from its path.  In Keynes' words,

a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

Johnson presented himself as the improbable transformation of Brexit horror into future triumph, to be won through his indomitable vitality.  English people are like Americans in frequently skipping the details of capitalist operations in favor of capitalist vigor. The hero of this story is the willful entrepreneur, the small business person, the "job creator"; the villain is government regulation and society itself.  Descended from Schumpeter, Hayek, and many others, what we now call neoliberalism is a thinly-veiled social Darwinism.  The losers--the homeless, children in poverty, the poorly educated, the shivering elderly whom Labour would befriend--are required by the nature of things.  It's what Cedric Robinson called racial capitalism in action.

For Corbyn and other Labour candidates to try to make England more equal and just was seen as irrelevant or even opposed to prosperity, which is now generally assumed to come from private investors, financial engineering, from everywhere except from the "poorest communities" and their labor.  Given the nationalist mixture of manhood, race, country, and money, it's common sense even for many members of those communities themselves.  In reality, the private sector depends fundamentally on state investment--and on privatizing public resources.  The fountainhead of "market forces" as channeled by vigorous male champions was outdated even as is was being (again) conceived in the 1930s. But it persists in countries like England and the United States, where it dovetails with nationalism.

Thatcher was one of the origin points of economic nationalism for working people.  She offered them income through property ownership rather than industrial labor, which she helped to destroy. After decades in which investment returns have increased much faster than wages, the main way to stay afloat in England is to join Thomas Piketty's rentiers, who prosper in an England where labor does not.  Big returns are implicitly adversarial--your wealth is the other's hardship (your London house, their unaffordable rent).  They require a kind of hardness that Johnson relishes and that Corbyn rejects.  Rentier relations are threatened by Labour's ideals of shared social investment in collective development, and they threaten the parts of the working- and middle-classes that depend on property income or ever-growing spreads between their cost and your price.

Overcoming this conjunction of property interests, racial-religious identity, and masculinity is going to take much more time.  Sadly, as Johnson becomes the Orban of England, it's a very multi-racial English working-class that will pay the biggest price.

A very Tory England: