In my last post I wrote about the challenges involved in forging, or excavating, a communitarian and leftist British patriotism. Here I go into more detail about the detachment of patriotism from ideas of the communal in the 1980s, and argue that this detachment makes Thatcherism less schizophrenic, and more grimly powerful, than some analysts believe.
Fixing the figure of Rees-Mogg in his sights, James Meek wonders: how does this personage hold together? How can someone be so apparently patriotic and so unconcerned about the deprivation of their patria? How can he claim the status of a patriot, and in the same breath defend austerity or push for a no-deal Brexit? Like his colleagues in the European Research Group (over which Rees-Mogg presided until 2019, when Meek’s article appeared), the MP for North East Somerset proclaims his patriotism with a new nativist fervour. On the other hand, the economic policies to which the hard Brexiteers cleave, and hope Brexit will unleash, propose a wild openness: the deregulation of as many markets and sectors as possible, with the City of London restored to its hegemony, regaining its status as virile jungle. Veneration of Thatcher as the genius of hyper-deregulated capitalism (Rees-Mogg: ‘the great, almost divine Margaret Thatcher’) obscures any awareness in her disciples of a possible tension between her two sides: the patriot in whose heart her country has a pre-eminent place, and the spokesperson for a neoliberal economics which, with its inscrutable market forces reigning unchallenged, is placeless.
Meek calls this contradiction the ‘bug lurking in Thatcherism’. It’s a popular prism, on the left, through which to understand Thatcher’s rule: John Gray, in a recent essay on Boris Johnson, describes Thatcherism as ‘a blend of Burkean traditionalism with Hayekian libertarianism’, but within the same sentence retreats from the metaphor of a blend and calls it instead ‘a highly combustible mix’. Thatcherism, this theory goes, is incoherent without knowing it – a ‘mix’ of rooted, reactionary values and a ruthlessly placeless economics. But this theory’s unsatisfactory.
‘Two Jacobs’
Initially, Meek solves Rees-Mogg’s seeming duality by doubling him, dividing him into ‘two Jacobs’. One is a ‘a rolling re-enactment of steak-and-kidney-pudding Edwardian Britishness’, obsessed with Britain’s glorious past, imitating the men who presided over that supposed glory with a spirit that, as Meek says, ‘hovers on the edge of self-mockery without committing to it’. The other Jacob is ‘a practitioner of the most weightless form of global capitalism’, a shrewd and powerful fund manager who understands that capital in the twenty-first century is liquid and unrespecting of national boundaries, that the enrichment of executives in the City has precious little to do with the distribution of wealth in Britain. However, Meek resists the easy conclusion that the first Jacob, the Edwardian, is merely a disguise for the second: a member of the financial elite shamelessly helping himself, distracting the public with a show of cartoon patriotism he himself doesn’t believe. Meek argues that the two Jacobs are really one, two ‘facets of a single worldview’, however glaring their apparent contradiction.
But Meek also believes that Thatcherism is secretly double, a temporary welding together of two ideologies – British patriotism and neoliberal economics – which must one day come apart. So, in order to reject his provisional doubling of Rees-Mogg, Meek needs him to be something other than a Thatcherite. He argues, accordingly, that the particular brand of right-wing politics Rees-Mogg and his crew represent is better described as ‘Faragist’ than Thatcherist. Faragism is the variant of right-wing Tory politics thrust into the mainstream, and the Conservative party, by Nigel Farage. It isn’t, Meek proposes, just a simple recapitulation of Thatcherite doctrine; unlike Thatcherism, Faragism solves the problem of ‘the bug’. Rather than believing that austerity and deregulation will in time alleviate the nation’s worsening economic fortunes, Faragists instead celebrate a pared-down state as desirable in itself, and offer the population some new compensations for any economic hardship that paring down might bring. They articulate a defensive, grievance-based nationalism, expressed in hostility towards the immigrants whom they depict as the culprits for economic stagnation and as a homogenous eroding force on the nation and its identity. At the same time, they assert their nationalism in an endless sequence of triumphal symbolism and pageantry.
Anti-Communal Patriotism
Meek is right eventually to resist his mooted hypothesis of ‘two Jacobs’, with one as cover for the other. He’s right that elements of the new Tory right diverge from Thatcherism: the grievance against globalisation and immigrants; the obsession with symbols. Yet his essay underestimates how far Thatcherites could reconcile the apparent contradiction of patriotism with an economics of national inequality. Thatcher herself, of course, deployed compensations like those of the Faragists: in the middle of an unemployment crisis her government rode the patriotic wave of victory in the Falklands. Yet Thatcherism solves its inherent ‘bug’ even without such distractions. It does this in two ways, neither of which Meek really acknowledges. The first is the fervent optimism, heavily diluted in contemporary Faragism, with which Thatcherite zealots believed that deregulation and deindustrialisation would one day bring prosperity to the whole nation, or at least to anyone prepared to work hard. (There’s an apocalyptic strain to original Thatcherism: one day soon, just around the corner, after it’s taken our medicine, the whole population will recover.) The second tactic by which Thatcherism resolved its ‘bug’ is by exploiting and developing a British tendency to detach patriotism from the idea of the communal. The effect was a total severance of patriotism from the idea of a national community; as a consequence of this detachment, the tension between a patriotism that loves a country, and an economic program that impoverishes large swathes of that country, disappears. Of all the privatisations of the 1980s, perhaps the most far-reaching was the privatisation of patriotism.
Thatcherism was never libertarian: it believes in a strong and centralised state and invokes that state’s right to legislate on social affairs. When it does this – such as in the 1988 Local Government whose Section 28 prohibited the encouragement of homosexuality – it is supposedly protecting the only other valid social institution apart from the state, which is the family. Between the strong state and the sacred family, all other social institutions or levels of belonging were disregarded: local and regional communities, and the principle of civic life in general. Exulting the rational self-interest of entrepreneurs making their fortune in the marketplace, Thatcher was also idealising the basic human instinct of providing for one’s family while dissociating it from the idea of serving a community. The vision of a strong state promoting the sacred family’s prosperity, clearing a regulation-choked marketplace for the family’s usually male breadwinner to make his fortune, sharpens patriotism into two primary modes: an exceptional mode, where this economic free-for-all is supposedly threatened by a tyrannical foreign power; and an ordinary mode, where one expresses one’s love of country by making money for oneself and one’s family. The communitarian nation that held out against Hitler, and rebuilt itself by massive government spending and the creation of social institutions, is not disavowed; Thatcher had time, intriguingly, for Clement Attlee, admiring him as a patriot. She merely saw the post-war settlement as outmoded: the newly muscular anti-communitarian nation she wanted to build, with a strong state guaranteeing the freedom of the entrepreneurial family, was its natural successor. Thatcherite patriotism thus hails a communitarian past – the glorious victory in the war – to legitimise its turn away from the communal.
Thatcher’s success in this move suggests that privatised patriotism has deeper and more general roots than the Conservative government of 1979-90. In championing self-interested entrepreneurship as patriotic, Thatcherism appealed to a traditional Whig idea of free trade as the bedrock of a Protestant and commercial British identity. In the context of the twentieth century, meanwhile, after the Russian Revolution and before the end of the Cold War, appeals to communitarian values are always liable to being decried as socialism, with socialism demonised as treasonous sympathy for the enemy. The lack of a revolutionary moment in British constitutional history bequeaths a state that was never overthrown by the people and remodelled in their image; paradoxically, this means that the British state is at once synonymous with the nation, in the absence of a constitutional enshrining of the nation, and easy to detach from that nation in the sense of the amorphous national community. The state Thatcher inherited, meanwhile, was highly centralised; even after the introduction of devolved government under Blair in Scotland and Wales, and its resumption in Northern Ireland, it remained so. This enables an intuitive severance in the popular imagination between the (nation-smothering) state and the levels of local and regional authority to which communitarian impulses could attach themselves.
So Rees-Mogg, for all his Faragist obsession with symbols and anti-immigrant posturing, is also a classic Thatcherite: to him, there is nothing contradictory in a fervent love of Britain and the support of economic policies that deprive or destroy the life of Britain’s communities. Love of Britain has nothing to do with contributing to communal prosperity: being entrepreneurial is itself a patriotic act, or is a neutral act offset by a patriotism demonstrated by preoccupation with symbols and declarations of private fealty. The most galling expression of this warped notion of patriotism is the efforts taken by patriots like Rees-Mogg to move their assets offshore, so that they pay as little tax on them as possible.
Maverick Patriots
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, founder of Ineos, has since Brexit shifted his public profile from that of anonymous entrepreneur to ‘maverick patriot’, embracing the iconography of the Union Flag and proclaiming his support for an optimistic free-trade Brexit while boosting his brand with the purchase the Sky cycling team and the sponsorship of Eliud Kipchoge’s sub-two-hour marathon. An investigation by Tortoise Media reveals that, simultaneously, Ratcliffe moved his principal address to Monaco so as to avoid paying about £4bn in tax. The Tortoise investigation insinuates that there are ‘two Jims’, that the maverick patriot is a front for the clever self-interested businessman. But in post-Thatcherite Britain being a clever self-interested businessman is itself, somehow, patriotic. A population that has endured a decade of austerity has grown contemptuous of tax avoiders like Ratcliffe, and tax avoidance is increasingly discussed as a neglect of obligation, it’s always identified as general moral obligation and never a specifically patriotic one. Opponents of a deregulated neoliberal economy, in which Thatcherites like Rees-Mogg and Ratcliffe can avoid paying tax, have unwittingly accepted a Thatcherite definition of patriotism.
Meek portrays what he calls Faragism as startlingly new: a political movement confined to the fringes of political representation until Brexit, despite UKIP’s breakthrough success in the local and European elections of 2014; a Tory faction frozen out under Cameron, suddenly flexing its muscles under May (and which, months after Meek published his essay, would get its man into Number 10). Remainers tend to think erroneously that Brexit, and the politics fuelling it, came in its madness from nowhere, but Meek is nevertheless right to depict Faragism as a marginal ideology riding a moment’s coat-tails to gain sudden prominence. Yet its speed and success in capturing the Conservative party after 2016 suggests that it isn’t quite Meek’s ideological bolt from the blue, but a latent and previously dormant force – a way of thinking about the country more general and dispersed than the specific political strategy (hardship with pageantry) of Farage and his backers. Its dispersal reflects how instinctive it has become in Britain to imagine patriotism as a private, anti-communal affair.
The right-wingers who have dominated British politics since the referendum are not a homogenous mass but a coalition, ranging from libertarian optimists who dream of remaking Britain as a hub of international trade, to nativists who want to close the borders. The nativist side itself encompasses considerable variety: those suffering economically and seduced by the scapegoating of immigrants; those with views considered liberal around 1990, angry now about their own scapegoating in a perceived culture war; xenophobes and Islamophobes, ethnic nationalists and racists. For this last sub-group, an authentic idea of the communal morphs into notions of a closed ‘race’ or ‘people’ which are as delusional as they are hateful. Yet what allows this coalition to hold together, and to gain the support of voters with no obvious history of right-wing sympathy, is the dominance of a particular kind of patriotism. I’ve been suggesting here that, in its total detachment from any idea of the communal, this particular brand of patriotism has Thatcherite origins. Thatcher’s hegemony over how we conceive of being patriotic is one of her most far-reaching legacies. In the last few years, though, privatised patriotism has increased in its urgency and reach. It’s also acquired some contemporary characteristics which are genuinely new: the obsession with symbols, the sense of grievance, the tone of defensive flippancy, the disguise of inattention and ignorance under a performance of reverence. This is the new patriotism, but at its base is an intuitive understanding of Britain and Britishness as anti-communal which goes back to Thatcher, and further.
Resisting Privatised Patriotism
How to resist the new patriotism, to stop it seducing millions of voters, is one of the million-dollar political questions of today. One strategy is to reject outright the idea of patriotism and a politics of particular belonging. This approach, which makes sense mostly to rich liberal people and hardcore socialists, is doomed to fail as an electoral strategy. The alternative is to try to reclaim patriotism, harness it to a progressive or even leftist cause. For this reclamation to work patriotism has to be (re-)integrated with the idea of the communal. As I suggested before, this is not impossible, but very difficult both ideologically and electorally. One place to start, however, might be to ask which national identity, of the several contained within the contemporary United Kingdom, is the problem.
The new patriotism is confined mostly to England, though it also occurs in post-industrial parts of Wales, where a unionist majority voted for Brexit. In Wales the continuing loyalty to Labour, especially in the south, perhaps reflects antipathy to the Conservative party more than a positive embrace of Labour’s communitarian politics, easily dismissed as unpatriotic. The constitutional ructions we have been experiencing for half a decade, both in Britain and in Ireland, are seen to emanate mostly from a radical shift among English voters, explained by the rise of a new nationalism that cares more about extraction from the European Union than the preservation of the much older United Kingdom. We all suffer, goes the party line, from the rise of English nationalism. An under-acknowledged paradox, therefore, is that the standard-bearers of this supposed English nationalism – the Rees-Moggs and Ratcliffes and Farages – deal so exclusively and relentlessly in the language and iconography of Britishness, and seem wholly uninterested by the idea of a genuinely English patriotism. Their interpretation of the Union as a singular polity, with sovereignty concentrated solely in the Westminster executive, is undoubtedly English. Their patriotism, however, is as British as it comes. In this light, England as a political community looks at the same time buried and in urgent need of exhumation.