
The 20th-century battle between communism and capitalism has had a strange, debilitating effect on British conservatives, by now almost completely captured, like their American counterparts, by a breathless Whiggish faith in the free market to cure all of societyās ills. A centuries-old political philosophy has dwindled into something little more meaningful than Liz Trussās paean to āUber-riding, Air-BnBāing, Deliveroo-eating, Freedom Fightersā.
Even the late Sir Roger Scrutonās worldview represented an uneasy marriage between Thatcherite capitalism and the last vestiges of the world that came before it. It didnāt ever quite perceive that the Thatcher revolution was too successful: by kicking away the last props of the pre-capitalist order that underwrote the traditional conservative worldview, it killed off that which it proclaimed to love.Ā
The ultimate irony was Scrutonās appreciation, late in life, of the post-Communist, quasi-authoritarian conservatism of Hungary and Poland as a model. For all the anti-Communism of their post-Cold War governments, surely it was the statist paternalism of their communist regimes that preserved in aspic societies fundamentally more conservative than those eroded by capitalist liberalism in the free-market West. Without Marx, there could be no Orban or Kaczynski; without communism, Hungary and Poland would look like Britain or France.
With this irony in mind, perhaps Government officials, ideologically adrift at a time of national crisis, would do well to read the Marxist historianĀ Perry Andersonās 72-page dissection of Britainās decline in the latest issue of the New Left Review. A first draft of modern history from the groundbreaking author of Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, Andersonās savage critique of modern Britain is as far from the court gossip and palace intrigue which characterises political journalism in this country as it is possible to be.
A product of Eton and Oxford, and of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the 82-year old Anderson demolishes the British establishment from within. Like many European if not American Marxists, Anderson is a stern critic of the hyper-liberalism, derived from French Theory via American Puritanism, which disfigures much of the modern Anglophone Left. He is, indeed, more conservative in his thinly-veiled and patrician distaste for Anglo-Saxon liberalism than our own nominally Conservative government. So what guidance can this elderly communist give our Conservative leadership at a time of national crisis?
Citing the most doom-laden author of Germanyās interwar Konservative RevolutionĀ ā noteworthy in itself ā Anderson warns that āDecline, banished for a season from reputable discourse, has returned in more drastic guise. What lies ahead,ā for Britain, āis more like the term in Spenglerās mistranslated title āĀ Untergang: not decline, but downfallā.
Britainās problems are structural, the combination of appalling economic planning over decades and inherent constitutional dysfunction: āWithout any mass upheaval, or even such turbulence as marked the seventies, the order of UkaniaĀ [a term for the UK adopted by Anderson from the Marxist and Scottish nationalist historian Tom Nairn] has been disrupted as never before since 1911ā14, with no new equilibrium in sight. All its components ā economy, polity, ideology, territory, diplomacy ā have simultaneously and interconnectedly been destabilised. The model of growth around which the country has been built since the late nineteenth century has generated such internal tensions that it has finally backfired.ā
The outcome, for Anderson, is the inevitable collapse of what he terms āthe Westminster stateā. As he declares, the ānexus is bound to dissolve, in one way or another. When or how is anyoneās guess.ā Andersonās essay, which follows theĀ slow-burning fuse of British decline back to the Early Modern period, is not party political: indeed, like many conservatives, he reserves his greatest ire for the various political and economic innovations of New Labour, which, like Thatcher before it, eroded Britainās old order and replaced it with something worse.Ā
It is remarkable, for all his Marxism, how much Anderson sounds like a Tory grandee of old when he observes that Thatcher āhad staged an intra-party coup, routing Tory paternalism as well as Labour corporatism with a cult of the market and a petty-bourgeois zeal no longer restrained by fear of the proletariat.āĀ It is difficult, at times, in his dissection of the finely-graded class differences of Conservative leaders, or in his digressive lament for the declining standards of public schools, to discern where Anderson the Marxist analyst of power networks ends and where Anderson the harrumphing patrician begins. Either way, the upshot is the same.Ā By the beginning of this century, he observes,Ā āTory England in the old sense was dead. What had replaced it in the Conservative Party was not better.ā
In foreign policy, Anderson channels Powell as much as any left-wing thinker when he excoriates Blair and Brownās āhyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power, whose pay-off overseas was a hugely greater sum of killing and tortureā. Paraphrasing the conservative writer Peter Oborne approvingly, Anderson savages the āsurrounding incrustation of advisers, assistants, researchers, lobbyists, think-tankers, client journalists and broadcastersā which New Labour introduced into Britainās political life, which, āinstrumental in all its relationships, without roots or connections beyond its own shallow, insecure, public-relations obsessed, ideas-empty worldā still dominates our politics.
We think here, of the lobby correspondent Matt Chorley, who gloated on the downfall of Dominic Cummings, like a palace eunuch in the court of the last Chinese emperor Pu Yi, that āevery genius who arrives vowing to shake up the media, undermine, bypass and destroy the lobby, ends up leaving. And for good or bad, weāre still there.ā That is, of course, precisely the problem, and it is Andersonās open contempt for our elites that guides the path to some form of solution.
There is, perhaps, an echo of the Neo-Tories of the 1930s in Andersonās tracing of the roots of Britainās current day decline to the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution, though of course fantasies of cutting a path back to Merry England do not occur to him. The source, for Anderson, of our relative economic decline is that āunlike any of its major competitors, the country knew no second revolution from above after the settlement of 1689, nor intervening convulsion on the road to modernity,ā and thus the āfault-lines now becoming visible followed from the original composite nature of the British state itself.āĀ
Summarising the Nairn-Anderson hypothesis underpinning the New Left Reviewās analysis of modern British history, Anderson, like the Scottish nationalist historian and writer Neal Ascherson, traces our current woes to our inhabiting an unreformed Early Modern union of three crowns, in which āthe very success of the Anglo-British parliamentary monarchy in overtaking all rivals to become, as early as the 1690s, the most advanced power of Europe, fixed it fast in a shape whose counterparts elsewhere were later swept awayā.Ā
Our early success is thus the cause of our modern failure: āDevelopmental priority and imperial success had arrested the British ancien rĆ©gimeāāthe grandfather of the contemporary political worldāā half-way between feudal and modern forms, leaving its structures an āindefensible and unadaptable survivalā of the transition from absolutism to constitutionalism,ā with the result that we remain trapped in āa conceptual landscape of Britain swept clean of all but āone significant life-form and one technology: the post-1688 ruling bloc and its prosthesis, the Westminster state.āā
If Andersonās thesis is correct then all our problems, in one way or another, lead back to Westminster and the great gothic fantasia on the Thames, the increasing decrepitude of whose architectural fabric is an almost too obvious metaphor for the British state itself. Can it be restored without bringing the whole structure crashing down? The very antiquity of the British state is argued, by some, as a source of potential strength: if devolution could be rolled back, if the almost dictatorial powers available to a confident executive could be wielded effectively, perhaps some of the rot could be cut away, as long as the essential structure underpinning it remains strong?
But the British state is only as strong as the people entrusted with its care, and it is the deteriorating quality of our elites ā a theme running through Andersonās essay ā that is perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of all. It is not, unfortunately, an exaggeration to observe that both main parties are dangerously incompetent, and that the also-rans are, if anything, even worse. The conservative journalist Henry Hillās recent call for a British āMeiji Restoration,ā a reassertion of the power of the central state in a programme of national renewal, āconducted with an eye to tradition and the power and sovereignty of the nationā surely falls at this hurdle: the idea may be good, we are forced to answer, but have you seen whoād carry it out?
So what comes after Westminster? The European experiment ā a Tory attempt at ātaking Britain into Europe as a surrogate for Empireāā clearly failed, leading to a fraught denouement whose terminal āBrexit referendum was a domestic quarrel, in which both sides were at mass level essentially oblivious of the ostensible object of the occasion, the European Union itself, other than as an object of polar cathexis; Remain and Leave opinion at large equally ignorant of, and indifferent to, its structures and mutations.ā
As befits the editor of the New Left Review, whose deep engagement with European politics is not matched by that of Britainās FBPE media ecosystem, Anderson is notably more critical of the wounded class consciousness or āstatus anxietiesā of Britainās bourgeois Remainers than of the Brexiteers, noting dispassionately that Remain was a project of the AB social class, support for which has led Labour to be āpenned in to the corral of an increasingly middle-classā professional, managerial, clericalā Europeanist constituency, where it risks competing more with Liberal Democrats than Conservatives.āĀ
As Anderson observes witheringly, āthe correspondence columns of leading dailies overflowed with professorial fury at the prospect of exiting the Union, literary periodicals raised a din such as London had not heard for a century,ā yet in time, āsome of the Remainer emotion of recent memory, the part reminiscent of mourning for Diana, will presumably fade.ā Instead, for our post-1688 political class, it is āperipheral nationalismā that will likely be ātheir potential nemesis,ā yet Andersonās analysis of Scottish nationalism is entirely devoid of the lust for national self-negation, part romanticism-by-proxy and part-schadenfreude, displayed by the London intelligentsia for whom he shows such disdain.
Following Nairn, Anderson undercuts the self-aggrandising mythologies of the SNP, reminding his readers that Scotland was not a colony but a beneficiary of Britainās industrialisation, and a keen and active participant in the imperial project. Instead, he traces Scotlandās sudden drive towards independence to distaste for New Labour, āthe neo-liberal regime in London, packed with vociferously unionist Scots ā Brown, Cook, Reid, Darling, Campbell et al: bards of Britishness to a manā whose economic mismanagement āantagonised more and more sectors of Scottish societyā.
The essential dilemma for the SNP is that Brexit has made independence simultaneously more attractive and impossible to achieve, at least as a member of the European Union. Pleading to enter Europe from without, its way barred by another fragile Early Modern kingdom, Spain, ādeparture from Europe has both inflamed Scottish nationalism and entrapped itā. We remain, unfortunately, trapped in a loveless marriage for the foreseeable future, with no preferable partners available and an ugly rift of some kind awaiting us.Ā
Intriguingly, Anderson takes the case for English nationalism more seriously than does our political class, sounding like a Marxist Simon Heffer in his sympathy for āthe country that had not spoken yet, the English, whose voice had long been usurped by a British-imperial class speaking for themā. As it stands, New Labourās constitutional reordering, by granting autonomy to the peripheries while keeping England subject to the Westminster entity, has set the stage for English nationalism to manifest itself in unappealing forms: āin not affording it any institutional expressionā Anderson argues, āBlairās project made it likely that [Enoch] Powellās intonation of it would be heard once more.āĀ
There are two Englands struggling to be born, Anderson argues: the angry, resentful England of the streets and a social-democratic European nation āwith a sensibility closer to the historic connotations of āLittle Englandā ā insular, but unambitious and pacific, socially somewhat Scandinavian, free of all illusions of grandeur.ā Indeed, here Anderson approaches a call for what we have in these pages called a certain National Hobbitism. Whether this is what weāll get is, of course, another matter entirely. More likely, in Andersonās view, is āa very British attempt to āmuddle throughā with a model which is itself not working,ā treading water as āa dinghy towed by the capital ships of Washington and Brusselsā until the Westminster stateās final collapse.
If there is a coherent thread to Andersonās broad sweep of British history, it is that the relentless outward focus of the Westminster establishment set in train a slow-burning decline at home. As he writes, āImperial expansion had formed this state. When that was no longer available, it followed its traditional outward bent, resolving to āpress towards the internationalisation of the UK economy as the answer doing most good to the flourishing parts of the system and the least damage to the ailing ones.āā
Yet every attempt at reform, by trying to solve Britainās structural problems at home through leaping headlong into the wider world, whether Europe, a subordinate role in the American empire or globalised finance, has only patched up the surface cracks and allowed the underlying rot to advance further. From 1945 onwards, British politics has been consumed by āfutile attempts at retrieving national greatness, in which the very term ādeclineā was a lure inviting the notion that ārevivalā was possibleā.
The essential problem we now face is whether or not Britain can survive as a unitary state. For Anderson, the answer is simply No: Britain was a project of empire, and without empire, the glue that held it together has dissolved. Simply, in Andersonās thesis, āthe stability of the old order had rested on the external forcefield of empire; once that was gone, the patriciate lost its grip at home, deference giving way to a āmolecular, resentful sort of rebelliousnessā, disabling the supports of the old regime, and Thatcherās lower-middle-class crusade could finish off the grandeesā.
The work of misguided destruction in the cause of renewal that Thatcher began, Blair finished, emplacing the charges that now threaten to destroy our state. The British state, for Anderson (sounding at his most like Peter Hitchens), was the British establishment of old: once they and the empire were gone, shuffled off the historical stage by the Pyrrhic victory of the Second World War and its consequences, decline and collapse were inevitable.Ā
The current government, entirely devoid of any meaningful political thought, would do well to read Andersonās essay. He presents a narrative stripped of all illusions, in which, as in Marxās famous quote, the British reader āis at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kindā. There is a strange unreality to British political life, with the relentless outward focus on the wider world so detached from our material conditions that it has become a kind of tragic delusion.
But there is no purpose pursuing dreams of a Global Britain while the Union fractures at home: any serious attempt to save the British state will require a serious, dispassionate appraisal of the structural flaws threatening to break it apart. If the current occupant of 10 Downing Street does not intend to make his mark in history as the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, he could do worse than inject a dose of rigorous Marxian thought into Britainās body politic, and there is surely no more suitable vessel than the detached, patrician analysis of Perry Anderson, that most High Tory of Marxists.
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