January 22, 2021 - 11:47am
Is Brexit really a Whiggish project? James Hawes seems to think so, judging from his review of Robert Tombs’ new book (This Sovereign Isle: Britain, Europe and Beyond) in The Spectator.
He mocks Tombs for comparing the campaign for Brexit to the Glorious Revolution. It’s this sort of thing which contradicts Tombs’ otherwise Tory take on British history, he argues.
But Hawes makes some rather dodgy historical comparisons of his own: “England is indeed well governed and peaceful — so long as its elite remain united. Whenever they split (the Reformation, the Civil War, 1715, 1909) the result is bitter strife.”
These events he compares to the “three-decade Tory war” over Europe. But the latter wasn’t actually a war, was it? It was a long-running disagreement on an issue of principle, that was settled democratically. No one was burned at the stake, there were no pitched battles, invasions or massacres.
Nevertheless, Hawes goes on to develop his argument: “The three-decade Tory war was very public. This more than anything made ordinary Englishmen doubt their natural leaders.”
Really? More than the catastrophe of the Iraq War? Or the ruinous financial meltdown on 2008? Or a decade of austerity? Or the scandal that is the housing crisis? Or the failure to control immigration?
When Tombs argues that “mistrust and anger have accumulated” in the ruling establishment, Hawes can only guffaw: “in whom exactly has this ‘mistrust and anger’ accumulated? Tombs need produce no plaintiff, for this is no English court. He is a quaestor working in the name of the people.”
The answer, of course, is the 52% who voted to leave — and the millions of former Labour voters who delivered the Red Wall to Boris Johnson. Is that enough identifiable mistrust and anger, for you?
In support of Hawes’ argument, John Milbank (another anti-Whig Remainer) tweets that Brexit is “ultra-capitalist” and “UNDOES Red Tory and Blue Labour ideas”. Then he really goes for it:
This is just so contrived. If it’s “ultra-capitalism” you want, then how about a Single Market that constitutionally embeds the “four freedoms” — i.e. the untrammelled export and import of labour and capital across national border in response to the demands of big business?
Brexit Britain at least has the democratic option to choose a different course. Capitalism, socialism, mutualism: it’s up to us.
And as for “cold whiggery”, what could be colder or more whiggish, than building a superstate from the top-down, severed from any living national tradition? Just look at the symbols of the federal bureaucracy — for instance the uniforms of ‘Frontex’, the new EU border force — can you see much Toryism in any of that?
Of course, terms like ‘Whig’ or ‘Tory’ are themselves historical anachronisms. The last examples of both died a long time ago. But they do have modern day equivalents. And it’s blindingly obvious how they line up on Brexit — and why.
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.
SubscribeThe remain side had some very reasonable if cold arguments to make, mainly:
Things in the UK weren’t particularly bad, why rock the boat. Yes we’ve lost some democracy, but we’ve got peace and prosperity.
They really believe their own lies though don’t they? Almost the entire elite stood for remain. 11/11 political parties were pro remain, the city of London, the CBI, the Lords, all the unions, the vast bulk of the media, the civil service, 99% of the luvies, the US government.
And yet the little people decided otherwise, and it was the little people – those who live quiet lifes in provincial towns, generally the poorer half too.
Rod Liddle make an excellent observation – the majority of areas were 55-60% for leave. But some city areas were 90-95% remain. Some professions and groups like artists were 99% remain. There was very little of same group think for Leave.
I’ve seen remain books claiming that it was (inferred evil) middle class England that voted for Brexit. In reality it was the working class who did it.
As Maurice Glasman said on the Roger Scruton podcast last week, the working class saved Britain twice – during WWII and in voting for Brexit.
And also BEFORE WWII by not yielding to the siren songs of Communism or Fascism even when, in the Depressed Areas, the poverty was truly terrible and people spent some years in a condition of hopelessness.
“The remain side had some very reasonable if cold arguments to make, mainly: Things in the UK weren’t particularly bad, why rock the boat. Yes we’ve lost some democracy, but we’ve got peace and prosperity.”
Excellent point. And also that they never, ever played this card. Instead, they sneered down at the rest of us.
Even the argument ‘we’ve lost some democracy, but we’ve got peace and prosperity’ has holes the size of the Grand Canyon in it.
[1] Peace in ‘Europe’ since 1945 (though not in the Balkans) has never been due to the European federating project but to the standoff between the NATO countries and the Warsaw Pact, with weapons of mutually assured destruction; ALSO the experience of sheer personal ruin in most European countries affected by WWII.
The cities of Germany and other lands were, in the main, undamaged in the First World War. In the Second, they were flattened. The reluctance to chance that sort of destruction, even with the use of only conventional weapons, was now intense.
[2] If you diminish or banish democracy, how long will you have prosperity?
A monolithic state of imposed homogeneous ideas and outlook is of itself no seed-bed of new invention.
I agree, nevertheless the “small c conservative” argument for Remaining would still have been more cogent, not to say decent, than the snobbish Remainer invective to which we have been treated for the last 5 years. Even in defeat they could have emerged with some self-respect. As it is, I just pity them now.
I agree but don’t go in for Silly Pity, which quickly becomes a back door through which the meritocrats with little merit, the elites of remarkable incompetence, can stride back into control of the public discourse again.
They never went away. The only solution is good democracy – like Swiss Referendums and for limited governments powers. I’m happy with a single payer health service for example, but appalled by the Police state.
It’s exceptionally rare for people who genuinely want less state power to seek office, it’s not in their makeup.
We also need a better society, educated about rights (real rights) who understand history and the danger of totalitarian regimes. Sadly we’re moving in the other direction.
I don’t disagree with the these points, I’m always annoyed by the “EU brought peace” argument.
As you say NATO Vs Warsaw pact brought peace.
Also pre WW2 Western Europe had 3 World Powers Germany, France & UK. Post WW2 there were none, the UK was a distant 3rd place the to US/Soviets.
But as Drahcir puts it: small c / status quo conservatism is not a bad thing, it’s a comfortable rut maybe – but god knows the world has suffered a lot from revolutions.
Musicins complain They need EU visas Now..Yes but that Was Brussels insistence,NOT UKs…
I have to take issue with you on including the City and CBI here Luke. For sure they ‘wanted’ Remain because that meant there would be no change in how they did what they did. Brexit meant change which means more costs which means smaller bottom line. As a businessman myself, of course I wanted Remain. Makes no sense to do otherwise. But OK we have Brexit now, we’ll make a go of it because that’s what we do. It was the agonising 4 1/2 years in the middle that pissed everyone off. Bottom line: just tell us what we have to do and we’ll do it…. actually a lot better than what you think we will. I have no doubts at all that after a period of transition which will bring awkwardness into everything we do, we’ll figure out a way to do it better. Now if the government starts interfering, all bets are off. They just need to say what and go away.
Hear! hear!
” Makes no sense to do otherwise”
Yes, if your only purpose in life is to make money.
I don’t disagree with the uncertainty thing, nor the ability for business to adapt.
I think their is a difference between small businesses and the CBI/City. The majority of small businesses do negligible foreign trade, but have been affected by the wave of rules and regulations. So small business owners were much more open on the question.
Big business and the city tend to have a lot more trade with Europe, they’re big fans of regulation (as it cripples smaller competition) and these people tend to be pro technocrat and anti democracy. They like to phrase it a little differently but the same argument has been made since at least Plato – “leave it to us experts” , who just happen to favour the status quo.
‘And as for “cold whiggery”, what could be colder or more whiggish, than building a superstate from the top-down, severed from any living national tradition?’
I would say that was more Hegelian but it’s a reasonable point and forms part of a good article. There was certainly a case to be made for Remain, and I was once extremely pro-EU myself. It’s just that the Remain case was so often based on lies, possibly because the truths that supported the case for Remain only served to reveal the true nature of the EU project.
The fatal flaw in the Remain campaign was that before, during and since the Referendum the Remainers have told us that leaving the EU would mean DOOM, but they never presented any feature of EU-membership that was positively attractive.
This flaw, I think, was not a mistake or failure on their part as a campaigning effort. It is a (deadly) fault in the very nature of what they recommended; like puffing and pushing the career in opera of a soprano who cannot sing.
Hawes is just an identikit left-liberal snob. He has recently rubbished a well received history of Germany – Blood and Iron – as well as Tombs’s book on Brexit – which was appreciatively reviewed by Dominic Sandbrook. I plan to buy both.
Excellent defrocking of another remainer piece of moanery!
If it looks like a superstate and it smells like a superstate and it
acts like a superstate, then just maybe, it is a superstate.
The EUmpire!
Were the Frontex uniforms designed by Hugo Boss by the way?
I’m sorry to say again and again that the tone and the English of Mr Millbank’s statement are enough to turn most people away. I will not pretend that I didn’t understand what he said but it was more that I couldn’t be bothered to understand.
The people who voted for Brexit spoke normal English about everyday concerns in their community, things like no jobs, too much uncontrolled immigration, too much focus on gender issues. The fault with the left (as per Paul Embery) is that they are trying to prove themselves cleverer than anybody else.
On another thread I was criticised because I was supposedly trying to be clever by pretending to be simple, when I said that it is interesting to look at the literature of all sides before making a decision. The point is that, theory and anger apart, it is easier to win a battle using the invective of opponents against themselves, rather than battle out theory versus theory.
Chris I made the effort to get this. It seems guff but maybe I’m too dim. I think his point is Brexit voters were duped into voting for Camelot; really they voted for formica tables and strip lighting. I might be wrong if so please enlighten me. I don’t want to be deprived of this guy’s insights. He uses big words, either to make himself sound good (fail!) or to disguise his belief that leave voters are thick, easily manipulated little Englander xenophobes or whatever the insult is today. As a remain voter sick of being expected to despise people I accept the nature of being duped is not to notice it; maybe I was duped into voting the way I did cos I was told that’s what clever and cool people vote. But Mr Milbank might want to know it takes real skill to notice when you’re duping yourself.
And they wonder why they keep losing!
Helen, as I say elsewhere, the main idea of a site like UnHerd (to me) is to listen to the logic of other people’s opinions and try to improve mine. Unfortunately, people don’t believe this and they think it is a ploy and that I really think I am cleverer than everybody else by pretending to be dumb.
I truly believe that to be clear and to enunciate their ideas properly people need to ditch jargon and talk like ordinary citizens in the street. If they can’t do this they might as well not bother because no-one will listen.
“Of course, terms like ‘Whig’ or ‘Tory’ are themselves historical anachronisms.”
The terminology may be anachronistic, but they do a better job of defining the split in culture and politics than any other.
We have reached the point, in our institutional politics, of complete Whig hegemony – greater even than 1688 – with the vast majority of both Conservative and Labour politicians being, essentially, Whigs. The 52% were partially voting against that, too.
True Eighteenth Century style Tories are almost extinct institutionally, but their beliefs are still abundantly present in the population.
The Stuarts were wronged after all.
The Stuarts were scoundrels who from day One (James VI and 1st’s accession) saw their countries as personal property for them to enjoy entirely selfishly – like some big lottery win – and not as a great privilege and responsibility.
Nearly everybody in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland longed to be devoted to them, as the lawful inheritors of the Crown; but their rotten behaviour – going so far, in Charles II and James II’s case, as to take enormous bribes in gold from Louis XIV to shape British policy France’s way – wore out the national allegiance.
‘Oh what a world of love and bee-like loyalty did the Stuart princes harry and winnow away!’ remarked the poet Coleridge.
Quite. They were a textbook case of how a monarchy works only if the persons on the throne, for the most part, behave themselves.
Time and again the Stuarts proved rotters – so they had to go.
That’s incorrect. Charles I worked his butt off for the Kingdom and found himself confronted with a truculent Parliament. Charles II navigated through troubled waters to bring some sort of calm to the Kingdoms. James II never took any sort of money from Louis XIV, and was a more tolerant and hard working King than any politician.
What Whiggish nonsense have you learned?
If they were good at rule, why did the Stuart kings preside over a century in Britain in which there were so many plots, rebellions, and other symptoms of chronic political unhapppiness?
I think James I, for instance, was wise to avoid war with France and Spain. It would have been a blood-thirsty and pointless exercise.
But otherwise their refusal to allow Parliament to develop and be a forum of public debate about issues and some authority was a radical strategic error; like bringing up a family whom a paterfamilias keeps in chains, fetters and bound with strong gags across their mouths.
This same mistake was made by Cromwell.
Would there have been the Civil War, the Titus Oates Catholic-hunting outrage and so on, if Britons generally had been allowed a voice?
It all came to a head with James II. An English monarch who ends up putting 7 Anglican bishops in the Tower of London, has ‘lost the plot’, has he not?
One can agree that his Declaration of Indulgence was, formally, more liberal than the views of his opponents (the bishops AND nearly everybody else); but [1] there was a fundamental kind of dishonesty and self-indulgence in kings wanting to be Roman Catholic and at the same time monarchs in a fiercely Protestant Britain. A more genuinely honourable course would have been to abdicate in favour of Protestant relatives (however distant): the solution which was ultimately imposed.
[2] At that date Roman Catholic rulers were viewed with such suspicion (as to their supposed and actual absolutist tendencies) that anything James did which was not very much on the advice of the Anglican Establishment was bound to rock the boat violently. It did.
When somebody makes, year in, year out, everybody under his rule cry, something is wrong with the governor himself.
The Stuart kings did far too much of that.
Parliament itself showed what it would and wouldn’t allow when it was in charge during the Civil War. I can’t see them being happy with the Stuarts trying to make it a forum for debate, anymore than they were happy when the army tried to do that.
I don’t see James’ declaration as being dishonest, anymore so than I can see Englishmen bragging about liberty during the following century whilst denying it to their fellow Englishmen. I think James was trying to make things fairer, whilst also trying to implement goals he thought would benefit the Kingdom.
And, I think so yes, because Parliament would never have allowed more people a voice, given it wasn’t in the interests of the noble elite to allow it. Nor did the public seem basically aware of what was what.
How did it make sense for Charles I to marry Henrietta Maria, a fanatic Roman Catholic of fierce missionary zeal; and who, all expectably, brought up her sons to be unhappy with any other communion?
Already some of the best and brightest in the land had left it (the Mayflower etc) because they were unhappy with the English court’s high church inclination.
Elizabeth I had shown the way forward with a militant moderation; putting down BOTH Catholic and Protestant excesses, insisting on a prayer book which left the mystery of the Holy Sacrament a mystery, not something to fight endless sanguinary wars over (she said she did not want a window into men’s souls). By these means England had avoided the terrible divisions in Europe during the second half of the 16th century.
I cannot respect a monarch who was so stupidly provocative as Charles I.
Also a few extra things
Those 7 archbishops were also guilty of treason. What should he have done with them? Henry II had Becket murdered, Henry VIII would’ve done the same to Wolsey (had he not died en route), did the same to More and Fisher; Elizabeth threw Gardiner in the Tower (IRC). But they were filthy Catholics so it’s excused.
They were trying to rock the boat deliberately. It was James who was struggling to keep his footing.
king who sees his crown as coming from God alone. Abdicate? Who are the kings of England who abdicated? Let’s think: Henry VI (technically). Murdered shortly after Tewkesbury. Richard II. Murdered shortly thereafter. Edward II. Got a red-hot-poker up his arse shortly thereafter. And most importantly, Charles I (like Henry VI he didn’t technically abdicate, but he was deposed), executed shortly thereafter. Mary, Queen of Scots. Imprisoned shortly thereafter. Jane Grey, executed shortly thereafter.
To suggest that James should’ve abdicated or renounced his rights to the throne is ridiculous. He has all those examples of what happened to kings who abdicated. Why the f**k would he have done so?
There is no Tory party, not anymore. All that is left is the descendant of that traitorous ideology called Whiggism.
Why can’t all these silly liberals buzz off and become bad science fiction writers, or something?
NO! I like reading good science fiction and its getting hard enough to sort the stuff worth reading from the dross.
ps – I’ll accept then becoming something
Yes, especially since Banks died.
I agree with you completely. The trouble is finding something they should become without insulting anyone already in that job.
The only possible job for people who make their way in life – and achieve self-belief – via snobbery (for instance, the sneering kind of hardline Remainer) is sweeping the streets or cleaning public latrines.
In any other employment they will do serious damage.
Hell’s teeth Peter don’t give them anything that has to be seen to be finished i,e, clean gutters. er… what public toilets? (any near you?
If you think about it, your very attitude shows that they aren’t convincing many people.
They have Try Getting ”Climate Change is Nonsense” ,as was” Global Warming ”in 4th Glacial age … in new Scientist,New Statesman,Spectator, Most newspapers or Internet Sites ..CO2 is bogeyperson, even though it is necessary for photosynthesis,crops, forests etc..
I would say John Milbank was the most self deluded (postliberal) neoliberal, (socialist) capitalist on the planet.
His only language is doublespeak.
Britain is run by a political class which goes beyond the ranks of the Conservative Party – it also includes senior civil servants, army generals, media moguls and of course the other “mainstream” political parties, not least the Sir Keir Starmer/Tony Blair wing of the Labour Party.
Whatever their superficial differences, they are united in the aims best summed up by Sir Humphrey in an early episode of “Yes, Minister”: stability.
From 1945 until the 1970’s, stability was maintained by the welfare state, council housing and full employment; from 1979 to 2008 we were told that home ownership would guarantee our long-term economic security, and we voted accordingly.
Since 2008 there has been no guarantee of long-term economic security, and thus no obvious way for the political class to maintain stability.
The splits in the Tory party reflect the crisis in the political class as a whole. “Sensible” opinion was against Brexit, but their opponents won through, at least temporarily, and within a few months even the Official Opposition have fallen into line.
There is indeed a historical parallel – with 1940 (though not the parallel our Prime Minister would like to draw!) For in 1940, the “sensible” majority of the political class clearly felt that stability would best be assured by an understanding with Hitler.!!