As the United Kingdom exits the eu, the political scene has all the trappings of a restoration. The Tories are back in office with their largest majority since the 1980s, thanks to the long-ignored northern working class. The uk is resuming the offshore relationship to the project of European integration it had in the 1960s. The Prime Minister is a reversion to type: Old Etonian, former editor of the Spectator, author of The Churchill Factor (even if his family background is more cosmopolitan-bohemian than landed-capitalist). Johnson likes to be photographed in front of two Union Jacks and effortlessly assumes his hero’s neckless-bulldog pose, brightened by a blonde Beatles mop. Aspects of a traditional ruling-class persona—decisiveness, vitality, enjoyment—were foregrounded in Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ election campaign, which cut the Gordian knot of a political crisis that pitted Parliament against the Prime Minister, the Supreme Court against the Crown, Holyrood against Westminster, London against the North. ‘A second referendum is no longer an issue’, Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary confirmed the day after the election.
Symbols matter. But the nature of Johnson’s ascendancy is best grasped through the multiple crises—economic, social, regional, national, European—to which it presents a solution. Chronologically, the story is simple enough. The knell of what appeared to be a long period of political and economic stability was first sounded in the City of London, with the financial meltdown of 2008. Recession and social crisis intensified from 2010, when the Cameron–Clegg government complemented City bailouts with fee hikes for students and pro-cyclical austerity, deepening the regional immiseration of the deindustrialized north. From 2011, the Eurozone crisis inflated the uk’s social inequalities: capital fleeing to the safety of the London property market, unemployed eu workers to agency jobs in the hinterlands. The eu question, previously low among voters’ priorities, began its climb up the national agenda.
From this point, four political alternatives opened up. The first was ukip’s call for a national-independence struggle against Brussels rule. The funds and cadre for this movement were supplied by City mavericks; its initial base was older Tory voters, especially in the market-town south. Second, Scotland’s demand for national self-determination, fuelled by opposition to English-Tory austerity. The radical, youth-led ‘Yes’ campaign took on the character of a social movement, mobilizing the old working-class heartlands in Dundee, Glasgow and Strathclyde.footnote1 The third challenge came from the Labour Left under Jeremy Corbyn: an appeal to redistribute wealth and recast foreign policy, distancing the uk from nato’s wars. Corbyn’s base was cut from the same socio-economic cloth as the Scottish #IndyRef campaign: young, university-educated, semi-precariat. The fourth position, defence of the status quo, was in principle the most powerful; among its supporters were the liberal intelligentsia and all those who benefited from things as they were. From 2014, the struggles between these competing alternatives would extend the uk’s complex crisis into its party system and multi-national state, questioning its relations with the eu and position in the Atlantic order.
The City, eu, nato alliance, multi-national state, Westminster party system; classes, regions, parties, voters—how should these multiple structures and agents be articulated? This question was addressed by Tom Nairn in 1981; and although his elegant account of the national compact needs updating, its lineaments are still highly relevant today.footnote2 Nairn argued that the country’s early capitalist development and overseas expansion under a powerful landowning class had given a uniquely outward-oriented cast to the post-1688 state, which the world’s first industrial revolution then powered to global predominance. The initial class configuration remained intact: the manufacturing bourgeoisie, concentrated in the north, was socially and politically subordinate to the southern landowning aristocracy, under an oligarchic parliamentary system that pre-dated universal suffrage. There was no struggle for national self-determination, no modernizing second revolution—nothing to compare to the galvanizing effects of Bismarck’s Germany, the us Civil War or Meiji Japan. Instead, the rising bourgeoisie was absorbed into the existing aristocratic state and civil structures.
The world dominance of the City of London served to divert investment away from the northern industrial regions: higher returns were to be found overseas. The upshot was the asymmetry of class and region described in Hobson’s Imperialism: a nation polarized into a smaller, industrialized north and a larger, consumption-oriented south, living off the proceeds of empire, whose ‘well-to-do classes mould the external character of the civilization and determine the habits, feelings and opinions of the people’, while labour is ‘closely and even consciously directed by the will and the demands of the moneyed class’.footnote3 The Labour Party, Nairn argued, accommodated itself to the hegemony of the metropolitan heartlands, seeking only a compromise formula of better wages and welfare provision, under a continuing ‘outward-looking over-balance’ of uk capitalism that deprived small manufacturing firms—the German Mittelstand—of adequate investment and technical support.
Under Thatcher, Nairn wrote, southern hegemony ‘appears naked’. The southeast was increasingly a service zone for international speculation, insurance and re-investment. What remained of northern manufacturing could be sold off to us, German or Japanese multinationals. Outward investment soared with Thatcher’s abolition of exchange controls, as did domestic bankruptcies, in a dramatic acceleration of the old extraverted state strategy. ‘Decline’, the long-standing British affliction, was no longer a national phenomenon: it was regionalized, concentrated in the north. The national questions of Scotland, Wales and Ulster, Nairn now argued, should be seen as lodged within the uneven development of the north–south divide, produced by the external orientation of the state.footnote4
One aspect Nairn did not explore was the contradictory post-imperial world position of the uk. Here, the three zones of global influence identified by Churchill—dominion over the empire, partnership with the us, offshore balancer for continental Europe—had been turned inside out. By the start of the 21st century, the uk had surrendered military and geopolitical sovereignty to the us in order to participate (albeit with subordinate status) in continuing global predominance; it occupied a semi-detached position in relation to Europe: a member of the eu, but firmly outside the Eurozone and Schengen Area. Meanwhile, the south-of-England hegemony Nairn described has been inflated by successive asset bubbles, courtesy of the Federal Reserve, that have poured trillions into the financial sector and pumped up the overall position of the City. Within the eu, the uk state loosened its sub-national borders—devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales, the Good Friday Agreement—and accommodated itself to the growing body of European law.