Our potential was not unleashed. Credit: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty
On New Year’s Day, this year a liminal moment between a bad 2022 and what is sure to be a worse 2023, how are we to mark the 50th anniversary of Britain’s ill-starred entry into the European Community? Perhaps some insight can be gleaned from the contemporary historiography of the British state itself. For the great historian J.G.A. Pocock, writing at the time of Britain’s entry to the EC, the “obvious absurdity” of the momentous decision that “neither empire nor commonwealth ever meant much in their consciousness, and that they were at heart Europeans all the time” came as a great psychic shock.
A New Zealander, previously secure in his oceanic British identity, Pocock worked through the implications of the moment in his 1973 lecture, “British History: a Plea for a New Subject”, composed, he would later note, immediately “after the great divorce which occurred when you told us that you were now Europeans, which we, as New Zealanders, were not”. It was a conceptual reordering which meant “you cared as little for our past as for our future”.
Yet, Pocock observed, the implications for Britain were just as great as for the home archipelago’s imperial cast-offs. For after all: “if it has been psychologically possible for them to annihilate the idea of the Commonwealth…it is not altogether beyond the bounds of possibility that ‘United Kingdom’ and even ‘Britain’ may some day become similarly inconvenient and be annihilated, or annihilate themselves, in their turn.”
Without a grand overseas project with which to occupy itself, the centre itself, focused on Westminster, may not hold. Future historians may find themselves writing of “a ‘Unionist’ or even a ‘British’ period in the history of the peoples inhabiting the Atlantic Archipelago, and locating it between a date in the 13th, the 17th or the 19th centuries and a date in the 20th or the 21st.”
What evidence for this prediction can we find, a half-century later, in the collapsing British state of 2023? It is self-evident that the act of leaving the EU was an act of self-definition, a great inward turn to force the questions of what Britain is and what it should be back to the heart of national politics. Support for Brexit was closely aligned in the minds of its voters with a return to an economy of domestic industrial production, and to a drastic reduction in the historically unprecedented levels of inward migration to which the British political class had committed itself.
Yet the Brexit we got was another Brexit entirely: a vision of Britain as a global trading power entirely unmoored from the realities of its position, a product of the fact that our politicians, for all that effective governance of the UK remains beyond them, find our islands too small a stage for their talents. Johnson, Truss, and Sunak are each in their own ways exemplars of how the ideology of global Britain has made the British governing class incapable of running a small northwest European archipelago, prisoners of a delusion that Britain must always strive to be world-beating, even as it struggles to maintain parity with its closest neighbours.
For the Welsh political philosopher and former Labour MP David Marquand, writing in 1995 in a collection of essays engaging with Pocock’s grand conceptual reordering of our island story, such global pretensions were baked into Britishness from the start. As he observed, “for most of its history, the identity embodied by the British state was quintessentially global, oceanic, imperial and, by virtue of this, non- or at least extra-European”. The new British state’s justification was the consolidation of the various kingdoms of these islands in a grand imperial project, with the result being a vision of the British state and people which Marquand termed “whig imperialist”. And at its heart, he said, “lay the twin themes of globalism and constitutionalism. The British state was, by definition, a global state; and the British people, by definition, was a global people.”
As Marquand observed, “the Whig imperialist vision of the British state helped to shape the mentality of the entire political class, left as well as right”. Whig imperialist Britain was Britain. “The British state was the child as well as the parent of empire. Its iconography, its operational codes, the instinctive reflexes of its rulers and managers were stamped through and through with the presuppositions of empire.” Even as the empire fell away, its ghosts still haunt Westminster, in inverted form, as a needy internationalism and an aesthetic distaste for the homely and familiar. Unlike our European neighbours, whose revolutions and wars of national independence helped clarify a secure sense of nationhood, Britain’s relentless focus on the periphery left a hollow void at the centre, at least for its rulers. As Marquand, now a convert to Welsh nationalism, observes, “shorn of empire, ‘Britain’ had no meaning”.
This interpretation does much to explain the strange pathologies of the 21st-century Westminster class, and elucidates the strange mystery of why Britain, more or less uniquely in Europe, possesses a markedly anti-national commenting class (intelligentsia is not quite the right word), whose European pretensions, like the continental affectations of a Hyacinth Bucket, are simply those of the provincial petit bourgeois, repelled by the drab simplicities of home. It explains why Britain, for a European country, is uniquely at risk of self-dissolution by global economic forces, and why its governing class’s sense of national identity, as far as can be judged from its citizenship tests, is such thin gruel, entirely indistinguishable from vague internationalist norms of liberal tolerance. It explains the compulsion towards mass immigration, entirely inconsistent with the demands of British voters: for as the empire folded in on itself, sucking the empire’s global children in along with it like a collapsing star, it became easier to remake Britain in the image of the world than to shape the world in a way congenial to British desires.
Such an interpretation also explains the extraordinary ease with which Britain’s governing class has reduced the country to a powerless factotum of America’s global empire, and the degree to which such total self-abnegation of sovereignty is presented and experienced, not as a humiliation fetish but as the natural order of things, and the bedrock of Britain’s security. To maintain its global pretensions, the Westminster class has been forced into a posture of what Perry Anderson termed “hyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power”. It explains why our Right-wing populists are enamoured of globalised free markets even as they rail against “globalism”, why our state broadcaster functions as a vector of America’s new ideological fixations, and why our royals as well as our politicians look longingly at the better opportunities to be found in California. It explains, too, why our sole national institution, the NHS, sucks both staff and patients from around the world, finding its merely national mission too paltry for its dignity, and the humanitarian obligations of the British taxpayer too bountiful to be shared only among the British people.
For the British governing class, and its taste-making hangers on, Britain as a small European country is simply too small a stage to bother with. Yet instead of addressing these tensions, surely the underlying cause of the failures of British governance which drove Brexit in the first place, the result of Brexit has only been to heighten them: more immigration, the Indo-Pacific tilt, the endless attempt to summon a Global Britain into being in a post-imperial world. The contradictions between Britain’s world-leading pretensions and shabby material realities are now becoming too sharp for the state to effectively manage. If Brexit has foregrounded one essential fact of British politics it is that the problems facing the country are rooted in its governing class: a class which swooped together with organic solidarity after Brexit to prevent any democratic attempt to redirect its course, and frittered away the country’s economic sovereignty on dreams of global relevance.
As Pocock observed, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms which accelerated the consolidation of the British state in Westminster were the result of England’s governing class attempting to resolve their own political divisions through the incorporation of their neighbours in a greater, shared project. For “the English did not want such a war, but found that they had to fight it with each other; and they hated it so much that they imposed it on Scotland and Ireland in the attempt to resolve it. The imperial sovereignty they imposed on other nations was an effect of the imperial sovereignty they had imposed on themselves.”
Britain’s entry into the EC was itself, likewise, a failed attempt to recapture a greater stage on which Britain could play a global role, and foundered on the same tensions, the inward-looking domesticity of the British electorate rebelling against the outward-facing cosmopolitanism of its governing caste. Always the foil of other nations’ acts of self-definition — a process now continuing, with Scotland, even in the home islands — Britain never saw the need or found the occasion to do so for itself. In the collapse of Britain’s empire, then, the only anti-imperial project that failed was that of liberating Britain from its own rulers.
But is it possible to liberate Britain from Westminster while maintaining the Union? The Union’s collapse would surely only leave us stuck with the same governing elite on a smaller and more claustrophobic scale, just as the cosmopolitan pretensions of the various Celtic nationalisms are, if anything, even more hysterical and absurd than those of the Union as a whole. Yet any attempt at a British Meiji restoration similarly falters on the unavoidable fact that the British governing class has very little interest in the governance of Britain itself — instead it recoils from it, as a distraction from the glittering possibilities of the wider world.
Such an elite makes a shaky foundation for a project of national renewal, yet without a total overhaul of Britain’s governing class, the remaining time in which to advance such a project is rapidly slipping away, before the nation dissolves itself with an affected smirk of enlightened tolerance. The revolt against Brussels then, was always just the opening salvo, on a continental front, of a far more difficult campaign: to become a prosperous European country, Britain must still liberate itself from the self-defeating foibles and global aspirations of the Westminster class.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeShe has been blamed. Who blamed her initially. Start there.
That’s right. Salem Witch Trials?
“There has been some commentary to the effect that those protesting Letby’s innocence should pipe down, that they are behaving irresponsibly.”
Who cares?? The people saying Letby is innocent should tell everyone else to ‘Pipe down’. She wont have fair trial unless those who have questions make a massive fuss.
Each piece of evidence on its own isn’t likely enough to secure a murder conviction. All of them submitted together paints a very different picture.
Too many who like to think they know more than medical professionals and police detectives seemingly want to gloss over the fact that an unusual number of babies died in strange circumstances, worries and reports from colleagues, she was on shift for all of them, she took home the notes and searched the families of those cases, she wrote a confession in her diary (so no coercion) plus numerous other bits of evidence against her. All in all it appears a rather damning collection of evidence when put together
Indeed. “Beyond reasonable doubt” is the legal test. She failed it.
It wasn’t an unusual number of babies that died. It was higher than average but this was a ward already identified as having serious practice failings before Letby arrived, a ward dealing with the most at risk babies, and a ward subsequently downgraded for its pre-Letby management failings. What is the “usual” mortality rate for such a ward?
We now know many other babies died of unexplained causes when Letby wasn’t on shift during that period. These deaths weren’t considered as attributable to murder because Letby wasn’t on shift. This is a kafkaesque circular argument.
The notes in her diary were written after she’d been accused – by just one colleague it seems – of misconduct in 2016. This was the beginning of an investigation that would lead to her arrest and prosecution. A potentially career-ending investigation is patently an oppressive situation. Arguments that it would only be oppressive if she knew she was guilty are absurd. Innocent people fear accusation, many innocent people persuade themselves of guilt when accused, and until this case the case law on confessions made in oppressive circumstances like Letby’s was quite clear.
As for the reliability of the criminal justice process, we have a reviewing judge who prosecuted a serious miscarriage of justice based on an incorrect use of statistics and a professional witness previously torn to shreds by another judge for his wilful bias and misrepresentation of facts. Shonky perhaps best describes a creaking justice system filled with people who are barely numerate flinging around complex statistics they don’t understand.
Top comment
Unfortunately, I can’t upvote it for some reason. Message I get is that I already voted for it – perhaps when the piece was originally posted in July?
Also, she was one of the few nurses on the unit with specialist higher qualifications relating to premature babies, so she was always going to be given the most vulnerable ones to look after. Hence the staff rotas.
And some people have a haughty view of knowledge, just as others have of power.
As for ‘appearances’, in the dark a bush appears as a bear. Whenever we read ‘could’, ‘may’, or ‘might’ – as in claims Britain could be at war in three years’ time – it is prudent to also read ‘could not’, ‘may not’, ‘might not’. And then to meet arguments about risk by examining the probability very carefully.
It was Conan Doyle through his character Sherlock Holmes who said that it was a capital mistake to theorise without data.
It would have been better if after Ms Letby had received the apology from the hospital to have left the nursing profession entirely rather than attempt to prove she was the best nurse ever. Did this create a contest between these different professional groups?
Although I’ve only served on one jury, I wouldn’t want to trust my life to half of those I met there. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that if I’d run a shop selling gloves, they would have persuaded themselves that I was a criminal mastermind. Or if I were a criminal mastermind, that I was just selling gloves.
Jury service do be VERY weird.
A similar situation happened in Canada in the early 1980s when nurse Susan Nelles was accused of murdering several babies by injecting them with digoxin. The evidence against her fell apart and subsequently it was thought that the cause of the digoxin poisoning was an error. The story can be found here: https://prism.ucalgary.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/6a7008f1-9a12-4426-81c2-14154f578f27/content.
I’m not a Brit and am only generally aware of the Letby case. My sense, though, is unless some strong new evidence is unearthed, or significant weakness (perhaps even fabrication) of the existing evidence is discovered, the chance of a further review of this case at appellate level is slim. In the absence of such revelations, the arguments will inevitably be somewhat abstract and inconclusive, with experts arguing over the laws of probability.
Yes. I think that is pretty much what the article concludes. I still believe this will ultimately been seen as a terrible miscarriage of justice
But that is the problem.
On balance of probabilities is for civil court cases.
Beyond reasonable doubt is (or rather used to be) standard for criminal cases.
I thought that under English law the decision of a jury is conclusive on matters of fact. Appeals are on points of law. The court of Appeal has heard and rejected these appeals. It strikes me that English legal justice has therefore been done in this case. I do wonder how many more “Yes, but” points should be entertained. In England, criminal liability has to be proved beyond reasonable doubt – but not beyond any conceivable doubt. That would surely be absurd. This endless inquiry may produce some interesting journalism for a while but does it further the cause of good and sensible law?
The problems in the case very much fall under reasonable doubt.
But the jury decided on that basis.
The point of these reexaminations of the case against Letby is not to further the cause of good and sensible law but to ensure that justice is done to Letby. If there is evidence she was in fact wrongly convicted are you in favour of suppressing it? The more the evidence relied on scientific evidence the more the scientific approach should be adopted. Science relies on testing a hypotheses. It is never settled but subject to falsifiability.
If substantial new evidence comes to light of course the court should consider it – but rehashing of matters already considered is another thing.
So are you suggesting that expert statisticians and medical experts and lawyers should not criticise the evidence upon which Letby was found guilty, and journalists should not knit their evidence together to impugn the judgement unless it can be considered “substantial new evidence” in case it might be regarded as rehashing matters already considered?
Much of the evidence was of a scientific nature and science is necessarily provisional and not final. As the Susan Nelles case highlighted above by Andrew Roman illustrates it can take time for the fallibility of tests to emerge. Miscarriages of justice are only revealed by many people persistently rehashing and reevaluating the evidence to slowly reveal the true facts.
Those in authority tend to wish to support the argument that once a verdict is rendered it should be final as that is much more convenient and supportive of the system. That should not be the attitude of the ordinary citizen. If doubt is raised by serious statisticians and medical experts regarding the evidence it is our duty to encourage further digging rather than turn away and pretend all is well in case it upsets the parents.
The point of re-examining the case is to ensure justice is done to Letby – whether guilty or innocent – AND the babies who died and their families. It has been clear from very shortly after the first trial that the statistical evidence was misleading – babies who died when she was not on shift weren’t counted – that doesn’t make Letby innocent.
There is a possibility she may have been responsible for killing the two babies with insulin imbalance but not those thought to have died from air embolism (and others not included in the case because they died when she was not on duty). These may have died from natural causes or may have died due to the conditions at the hospital, which, for some of the time, had sewage backing up onto the ward as well as staff shortages. If Letby takes the blame for all the deaths, others who may also be responsible walk away.
Yes, that what usually happens with NHS.
Find a scapegoat and sweep all the problems with dysfunctional organisation under the carpet.
And then stand outside your house applauding inanely.
“But if it be a question of words and names, and of your law, look ye to it; for I will be no judge of such matters.”
The jury was one of the issues. A juror was reported to the judge at the start of the case as he stated to other jurors that he believed she was guilty. The judge spoke to him and he was allowed to remain, which, speaking as someone who has been a juror on a serious case, I find extraordinary
As I recall it, revealing what was said at any point during the deliberation of the Jury is, in itself, a criminal offence and so if that anecdote is true then that would further indicate serious failings among the Jury.
Could not the cause of these rash judgement cases be down to the narrow pool of mediocre middle class people from which doctors and lawyers are recruited.
They already have contempt for those they consider the lower orders and just listening to some of them, they brook no dissent from their views, the same group provide most MPs..
I wonder what “wide pool” of exceptional people you consider yourself to be from.
Please spare us this nonsense.
My girlfriend came from abroad, get her A levels and degree here and then did whatever is required to become lawyer.
I know many lawyers, barristers and doctors.
None of them can be described as mediocre.
UK is one of the most open and meritocratic countries.
If you look at class and connections based society, despite claims to contrary, that would be most of EU.
Try to speak to Italians and French.
How many of them are amazed even at PhD level jobs searches, that they managed to get jobs in uk, without dady calling his mates asking for favours.
UK has many problems but not the one you complain about.
A very silly comment. You are talking about hundreds of thousands of people, who one would imagine vary widely in their abilities.
I don’t like the information in the article about the lead prosecution expert witness. In hot water for a previous poor performance. And pitching his services to the police/CPS who may have been tempted to use him for his attack dog qualities rather than his careful and fair analysis of the evidence. Smells wrong.
In the Sally Clark case the Court of Appeal initially refused to overturn the verdict until after 3 years and a second application was made when it emerged that Alan Williams, the prosecution forensic pathologist who examined both babies, had failed to disclose microbiological reports that suggested her younger son had died of natural causes.
There is great institutional reluctance to admit mistake indeed reports have already emerged to the effect that staff who might have given evidence in favour of Letby were discouraged by suggestions that to do so would harm their career in the NHS. I suspect that all the criticism of the evidence by those with professional competence to do so will fail to result in a further Appeal unless it can be established that there was excalpatory evidence held by the prosecution that had been withheld from the defence. This is the sort of evidence that can overcome the reluctance of Appeal Court judges to reconsider.
I remember the Sally Clark case well. I had studied Genetics for my first degree and the fact that congenital factors were not seriously considered I found astonishing. In the court case Meadows testimony explicitly stated that all infant deaths occur completely at random and a second one in a family is prima facie evidence of foul play. This was clear and obvious nonsense.
I can understand a jury being convinced by this uncontested evidence but could never understand why it did not cause outrage at the time.
The main problem with the Letby case is that the weakness of the evidence makes it more difficult to disprove on appeal.
‘The main problem with the Letby case is that the weakness of the evidence makes it more difficult to disprove on appeal.’
Yes, indeed. The very weakness of the evidence has been unhelpful to her, as it has created a vacuum into which have poured the emotions of the jury and the grief of the parents. As a result, this is the closest to a witch trial we have seen in modern times.
Would you be happy for this nurse to have charge of your premature baby?
Having read the New Yorker article, yes.
No, but I’m not ‘happy’ with the idea that she is a mass murderer either.
The whole ward at Chester Hospital was very lax with a very low standard of care. Never mind Lucy Letby!
What about nurses ignoring alarms for ages when family are present?
It happened to me on many occasions when visiting my uncle and my cousin for months in hospitals in London.
That is the main problem.
Letby, assuming she is guilty, is an outlier.
I wouldn’t want you on a jury judging me! Emotion is no basis for justice.
Yes, but at a better run hospital.
Whatever happened to “beyond a reasonable doubt”?
I recall reading article about DNA evidence.
Average person is likely to think that 1 in 100k chance of accused not being guilty is overwhelming evidence.
However, it means that, excluding children, there are 500 people who could had committed this crime in uk.
The only major guilt pointer from what I read is her being on shifts when bad things happened.
To me it is only correlation not causation.
The coincidental shift evidence is also statistically suspect – explained at length with nice diagrams by triedbystats.com
This statistician also dissects in forensic detail, the comments made in this piece along with some others.
Confirmation bias writ large
In practice, ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ comes down to whether the prosecuting counsel can successfully play on the jury’s emotions. In this case, “Would you risk putting your baby in her care?” Not relevant in legal terms but very powerful emotionally.
By the sounds of things you wouldn’t want to risk putting a baby on that poorly run understaffed ward with or without her being there.
Yes. From everything I’ve read about her, she seems to have been one of its few redeeming features, and one of the few people prepared to challenges its poor condition. No good deed ever goes unpunished, as her case clearly demonstrates.
Lost in the age of emotion and ‘my truth’. If I feel that she’s guilty, then she should hang.
The very fact that this discussion is ongoing not just here but in wider legal and social circles seems to suggest there is an incredible amount of scepticism on whether this was a safe verdict.
Adam King himself makes the point that the various routes of appeal are correct under law but as a contributor in this discussion pointed out ‘the expert witness for the crown had put himself forward for this case’ and when it became clear his previous’expert evidence’ at another trial was found wanting, then surely the judge should have stepped in and spoken to both sides on the legitimacy of said evidence in this trial.
Something just does not sit right in this case.
Defense should have retained a scientist to explain stuff to the barrister. Clinicians are not scientists and often don’t think like scientists. And any barrister could find it difficult wading through all that.
You make a very good point that clinicians are not scientists.
I remember a murder case where the Judge was persuaded of the defendant’s lack of guilt part way through the case. However, rather than stop the trial and dismiss the charges, he thought he would allow the case to go to the jury reasoning that the accused would be better exonerated by being acquitted by a jury than if he simply dismissed the charges.
Much to his shock the jury convicted and he had to impose a life sentence.
We know this because the Judge concerned made this public and wrote in support of the Defendant’s appeal. The conviction was subsequently over turned on appeal but not before the Defendant has served a significant spell at HMP
I hope he didn’t make that mistake ever again. Juries are, by definition, at least half composed of very stupid people, after all.
A very interesting article. Adding to the concerns about the possibility of Letby being wrongly convicted are the stories emerging that her colleagues and staff at the hospital were told, by the hospital administrators that they should remain silent, despite concerns on the part of several that she is innocent.
But hospital administrators would NVER involve themselves in a cover up. Or would they??
The fact is that in the face of so many stories about whistle blowers being treated abominably and the avoidance of such retaliatory action, these people are very frightened for their jobs and careers.
Yes, I did not know about it.
As a layman, I consider it enough reason to consider this trial null and void.
I believe 5 of the deaths were the subject of natural causes verdicts in coroner’s court. The ’embolism’ deaths are speculative and even the insulin ones may well have been natural. Therefore we may be looking at a mass murder verdict where there are in fact no murders at all. In the Post Office miscarriage we’ve seen large numbers of people convicted of stealing or embezzling money that did not ever exist. Meanwhile blatant theft, murder and violence go unpunished every single day.
Reading the press reports during the trial it was abundantly clear that the case was a miscarriage in progress yet every article I read was baying for her blood.
This is what happens if you’re conditioned to applaud the NHS at every opportunity.
“But arguably … while the probability of “coincidence” might indeed have been very low, so too is the probability of a mother murdering her children.”
And so it is the mathematician Thomas Bayes who should be invoked, not Pierre Laplace.
Bayesian statistics are not easy to get your mind around, but they are shown to be increasingly important in understanding complex statistical problems like this.
He writes about Bayes extensively in the article.
I’ll say essentially the same thing as last time: I have no evidence to offer as to her guilt or innocence. Only a vague sense of discomfort that something isn’t quite right. The more I hear about how the prosecution was conducted, the more uncomfortable I am.
Have to say, this does raise questions of whether in some cases it is appropriate for purely lay juries to be responsible for deciding on guilt or innocence.
Channel 5 has just aired a programme pointing out that no expert gave evidence for the defence, and that this may reflect fear of persecution in cases involving children, the experience of Dr Waney Squier who gave evidence against the reality of ‘shaken baby syndrome’. I have no opinion either way, how could I? However, I have just bought Rory Stewart’s book ‘Politics on the edge’ and will be interested to see what he has to say about British ‘justice’. Recent cases as well as notorious past miscarriages give me no reason to remove the quotation marks yet.