You broke it, you own it
Some conservative honesty about what the last twelve years has done to the country wouldn't go amiss right now
Something I see a lot from political commentators is a tendency to filter every event through their own very heavy prejudices. Writers and thinkers very often bring their own preconceptions to bear when interpreting news stories, which clearly makes it very difficult for them to objectively evaluate new information.
Matthew Goodwin is probably the epitome of this kind of behaviour, trying to trace every political happening back to the alignment of voters which won the EU referendum in 2016 and gave Boris Johnson a majority three years later. Dan Hodges’ inclination to find bad news for Keir Starmer in opinion polling which shows Labour holding huge leads over the Conservatives has become almost comical. But to be scrupulously fair, all of us are prone to such cognitive biases; pushing new information into our pre-existing mental schemas is far less psychologically demanding than having to tear up our underlying assumptions. This is just how we are wired.
The Telegraph seems to be going all in on desperate rationalisation at the moment. This is a newspaper which fervently supports the Conservative Party and Brexit, two causes which promised much and are delivering increasingly little. Brexit continues to decline in popularity, and the Conservatives look set for a big defeat in 2024. The Telegraph has got exactly what it wanted, and yet the country is an abysmal state; the longer the Conservatives cling on to power, the longer the reality of Brexit drags on, the less popular they both seem to become. So it is little wonder the paper is trying to reconcile these things away for its readers. On Thursday it published an article by Sebastian Millbank, which claimed that the reason the UK is currently struggling when contrasted with a strong French economy is because of… insufficient national pride.
It is a truly mad article, which in an aside seems to look favourably on France’s post-war attempts to cling on to its colonies. I’m not sure I expected to see someone commending French actions in Algeria and Vietnam in a national newspaper in 2023, but there we are. It is also an article which seems to contradict itself; at one point Millbank quotes former president Sarkozy saying that nobody notices strikes in France any longer, but elsewhere the author asserts that the French tendency to protest is what guarantees higher quality in the public realm, whilst also citing the current public sector strikes in the UK as an example of what is wrong with this country. It’s hopelessly muddled.
But the core assertion is that Britain’s politicians have created a governing culture which is moribund and defeatist, and only more national pride can save the day. This is such a good example of a commentator filtering events through preconceptions. The British economy is tanking, public services are in a terrible state, and you make no mention whatsoever about austerity or Brexit? If you wanted to make an honest comparison of the British and French economies and public realms, you might mention that the French response to the global financial crisis was much more tilted towards tax rises and away from public sector cuts than the UK’s. And one might expect a fair-minded commentator to at least consider the impact of leaving the European single market on a country’s relative economic performance.
An aside on Brexit here. I’ve not written much about the UK leaving the EU on these pages, but my position is - and pretty much always has been - a fairly lukewarm Remainer. Recently I met someone whose company went bankrupt in the wake of Brexit; other people I know who sell into Europe tell me about how much more difficult and expensive it has become. It has caused many headaches for businesses, livelihoods, and lives. During the referendum campaign I knocked on a few doors and delivered a few leaflets, and I remember my heart sinking on results night in 2016, but I’ve never really been imbued with the sort of pro-European fanaticism one can find still going strong in FBPE Twitter.
In part that may be because, although I think leaving was a mistake, I do have some time for Brexiter critiques of the EU. I accept that the UK essentially voted to join a trade area in 1975 and voted to leave a political union in 2016. I do have problems with the anti-democratic tendencies of the EU. And I do understand that our Brexit rupture is in some sense a continuation of the peculiarly semi-detached relationship we have with the continent, a pattern which has repeated through a thousand years of English history.
But, as with everything, there are trade-offs. I was prepared to accept what I didn’t like about the EU because I prioritised what I did; strong economic links, stability in Northern Ireland, good relationships with our near neighbours, a way for the UK to amplify our voice in the world. Of course there will be economic costs associated with leaving the single market; there already are. My expectation all along with Brexit was never a huge economic crash, but more a gradual decline, everything just a bit more difficult, our standard of living slipping slowly but tangibly behind countries who were once our equals.
I’m happy to acknowledge my Remain vote wasn’t for a perfect situation, and it would be nice if those who worked so hard to drag us out of the EU could at least admit that there are some downsides to leaving too.
Instead, we get articles in the Telegraph bemoaning the state of things without once mentioning that the reason everything is in a bad way is because the Telegraph got what it wanted. It wanted austerity, it wanted Brexit, it wanted Boris Johnson - it even wanted Liz Truss to become Prime Minister. So it all feels a bit rum to watch a newspaper completely ignore the wreckage created by the causes it has championed, and instead tell us the problem is a dearth of national pride. Is there any self-reflection here, at all?
I’d counter by arguing that perhaps this runs the other way anyway; what if national pride is dented because the public sector is so underfunded and overstretched? Maybe it’s difficult to have lofty ambitions for what the state can do when everything is hugely expensive and you have to wait for hours if you need to get an ambulance or go to A&E.
The reason the UK economy is struggling is because of the Conservative-led governments we’ve had since 2010 and the choices they’ve made; hacking away at the public realm, cutting back on investment in infrastructure, severing links with our closest trading partners. Perhaps it is this cognitive bias which prevents the Telegraph’s writers from understanding any of this; it would require an admission that they have been wrong about all the big calls in recent years, which is a psychologically difficult thing to do, so they fulminate about insufficient national pride. But after twelve years of your political choices running the country, you broke it, and you own it.
If I were a Tory, I’d be worried about the next general election, but I’d be much more concerned by the current failure of conservative thinking. Honesty about where austerity and Brexit have brought us would at least represent a starting point.
The idea that these half-baked Little Englander cretins would engage in any sort of self-reflection is laughable. These monsters dream only of enslaving and terrorizing the rest of the world, the only thing they deserve is a jail cell.