The EconomistOctober 17th 2020 Britain 49T
he britishlike to think that they have a genius for defusing
conflicts. France’s road to democracy lay through the Revolu-
tion and the Terror; Britain’s through the Great Reform Act. Ger-
many and Italy had Hitler and Mussolini. Britain had Oswald Mos-
ley, who signed his political death warrant as soon as he donned a
black shirt and took to walking oddly. In China and Russia
Communism resulted in the loss of millions of lives. In Britain it
caused a few misguided souls to waste their lives flogging copies of
the Morning Star.
Yet this illusion is born of a short-sighted view of history and
geography. On the island of Ireland British citizens have only just
stopped murdering each other for sectarian reasons. Peace is a re-
cent phenomenon on the British mainland, too. In the 17th century
the Civil War claimed the lives of a higher proportion of men than
did the first world war. The 18th century saw an epidemic of riots
and public drunkenness. Boyd Hilton’s volume of the Oxford His-
tory of England covering the years from 1783 to 1846 is entitled “A
Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?”.
Britain has enjoyed a stable couple of centuries not because the
British people are a naturally pacific lot but because of a uniquely
successful political settlement that prioritised compromise over
conflict and assimilation over exclusion. The traditional ruling
class had a genius for co-opting new social forces. Thomas Macau-
lay, the great historian of Britain’s peaceable settlement, pro-
claimed that the country’s aristocracy was the most democratic
and its democracy the most aristocratic in the world. Its institu-
tions have a genius for co-opting and civilising political divisions.
The weekly Punch and Judy show that is prime minister’s question
time may be tedious, but it beats fighting in the streets.
Yet this settlement is beginning to fray. One of the stablest
countries in Europe has become one of the most unpredictable.
The box of surprises that produced Brexit may well lead to Scottish
independence before the decade is out. France used to be the na-
tion of street protests, but during the height of the Brexit frenzy
Parliament Square was permanently occupied and the forces of Re-
main put 600,000 people on the streets. The British now hate their
political elites with continental fervour. A ComRes poll in 2018 re-
vealed that 81% of the respondents, and 91% of Leave voters, felt
most politicians didn’t take into account the view of ordinary peo-
ple. The country’s disparate parts are also growing sick of each oth-
er, as the Scottish independence movement produces an aggres-
sive English counter-reaction.
There is no shortage of explanations for these growing ten-
sions. Left-wingers blame de-industrialisation for creating a dan-
gerously unbalanced country one corner of which is much richer
than the rest. Traditional conservatives blame popular capitalism:
the masses want instant gratification and the elites can’t be both-
ered to uphold cultural standards. (George Walden’s recently re-
published “New Elites: A Career in the Masses” expounds this case
brilliantly.) But two developments have contributed most.
The first is the rise of identity politics. “Brexitland”, a new book
by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, argues that British politics,
which used to be organised around class, has since the 1960s reor-
dered itself around identity. “Identity liberals” are university grad-
uates who pride themselves on their “open-minded” attitudes to
immigration and ethnic minorities. “Identity conservatives” are
older voters (who grew up when only 3% of people went to univer-
sity) and people who left school with few qualifications; their eco-
nomic interests do not always coincide, but they share a pride in
Britain’s traditional culture, they bristle at attempts to marginalise
it and they set the tone of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.
Identity politics, which seeks to drive a wedge between “us”
and “them”, is far more explosive than class politics: you can com-
promise over the division of the economic pie but not over the core
of your being. Brexit demonstrated this painfully. Enlightened lib-
erals, even less tolerant than cultural conservatives, behaved like
middle-class passengers forced to sit next to a working-class hen
party on an overcrowded Ryanair flight. And neither side could re-
sist the temptation to taunt the other. David Lammy, a Labour mp,
likened the Eurosceptic European Reform Group to the “Nazis” be-
fore correcting himself and saying that the comparison was not
strong enough. Plenty of issues, from Scottish independence to
historical monuments, are susceptible to that sort of treatment.
The second disruptive force, closely related to the first, is the
rise of the meritocracy. In his prophetic book of that name Michael
Young argued that meritocrats believe that they owe their posi-
tions to nothing but their own merit, while the unsuccessful either
lash out against the system or turn in on themselves in despair.
The six-fold expansion of the universities has deepened the di-
vide. Britain’s education system is now a giant sieve that selects
the university-bound half of the population, depositing them in
big cities, and lets the rest fall where they may, feeling unrepre-
sented in Parliament or the media. White school-leavers are a par-
ticularly marginalised and volatile group, whose ranks are swelled
by a new problem that Young didn’t anticipate. Many of those who
get a university education feel cheated by it, for rather than offer-
ing admission to the cognitive elite, it may lead only to a pile of
debt and a future labouring in the “precariat”. History suggests that
the overeducated and underemployed are political tinder, as both
the Bolsheviks and the Nazis demonstrated.
This might sound overexcited: the British system survived the
1930s not only intact but enhanced. The Conservative Party has
done a good job of absorbing the raw energies of populism. The La-
bour Party is moving back to the centre after Jeremy Corbyn’s in-
surgency. But Brexit and the pandemic are further discrediting the
political class while shrinking the economy. The numbers of
“mad, bad and dangerous” people are growing. The country’s rul-
ers need to think more seriously about how to civilise them. 7Bagehot Mad, bad and dangerous
Britain’s political and social fabric is under unusual strain