Peak Corbyn will soon pass and we will return to political literacy
The Left may be on a roll, but peak Corbyn will soon pass, and political literacy will return after Brexit
For many people on the centre-right, it has been a dismal, shocking month. Extreme mood swings being the new normal in our increasingly emotive politics, it feels as grim to many of them as it did for their liberal-left counterparts these past couple of years.
Just as Remainers convinced themselves that the UK was finished last year, and in many cases were plunged into personal and professional despair, conservative Brexiteer types are almost equally despondent today. Some are discussing whether to liquidate all their UK assets; others who were exuberantly upbeat about the prospects of the economy just prior to the election are now born-again bears. It’s the mirror opposite of what happened after the referendum.
Tory Brexiteers are terrified that a Marxist revolutionary could be on the brink of power and that Brexit, their greatest victory since the Eighties, could yet be perverted. They look upon the Government’s chaotic drift, the Cabinet’s bickering and now the ending of austerity with horror, and wonder what has happened to the country they thought they understood.
The abrupt role reversal would be funny if it weren’t so serious, if the personal hadn’t become the political to such a toxic degree: two tribes who have grown so far apart that they cannot bear to see the other in the ascendant, and who are convinced that their own camp must be the natural majority. Yet I don’t quite share the despair of my fellow centre-right voters – or at least I can still, when I squint very hard, catch a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel.
Yes, the hard Left is on a roll, and the Government lacks the moral clarity to make the case for free markets. Yes, the Government’s wanton abandonment of the last attempts at living within its means is proceeding apace. And yes, the Cabinet remains bitterly divided on the exact nature of Brexit.
But I also suspect that, amid all of the turmoil, this month will in time be remembered as peak Corbyn. Over the past few days, Tory angst has begun to abate slightly. Theresa May is the caretaker PM. There won’t be another election any time soon. The Tories have ceded so much ground on the economy that there is little more to give, especially on public spending; and a side-effect of May’s abysmal performance is that she won’t be able to raise taxes or hit the economy with silly rules.
The Grenfell scandal was catastrophic for the Tories but the Government is finally getting its act together, and it is also clear that councils of all hues must face the music for a litany of errors that started under a Labour government. As to Brexit, it is still on, and my hunch is that the eventual deal will be only slightly different to what we would have achieved had May managed to grab a decent majority.
My greatest reason for optimism is a longer-term, structural one. Unlike almost everybody else, I’m reassured rather than terrified by the creative destruction that is engulfing our political system. It will eventually lead to a dramatic improvement in the way we govern ourselves, and in the quality of our political class. The sense of malaise across swathes of the country, the realisation that the UK’S political institutions are inadequate, the anger at the endless failures – all of that confirms that the Brexit process is forcing us to grow up and to confront our weaknesses.
It is often claimed, especially by international commentators with no understanding of British politics, that Brexit is the product of arrogance, of a belief that the UK is somehow superior, of some sort of relapse into neo-colonialism. That is almost the reverse of the truth: we need to leave because it’s the only way of jolting ourselves out of our present mediocrity. Our membership has infantilised our politics and hollowed out our institutions; it has turned us into a nation of political illiterates who no longer understand the people who govern us, and are thus unable to hold them to account.
We have, in some key senses, become second-rate: as we keep being told by Remainers, we have no farm policy or trade policy expertise, unlike properly managed countries such as Canada or Australia or Switzerland. The lesson of the past few decades is that one cannot successfully sub-contract governance: it is a nation’s core responsibility. Abdicating it has catastrophic consequences for accountability. Our establishment, including even its most educated and powerful members, had until very recently no real working understanding of the details and scope of the single market or the customs union (many in positions of responsibility still shockingly confuse the two). Virtually nobody could name MEPS or European Commissioners or even explain the division of powers between the EU and UK; unlike in the US, there is no discussion about appointments to the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights (the latter of course isn’t an EU institution). Partly as a result of this void, we kept being told that membership was a purely transactional deal, rather than a political project: the biggest, most corrosive political lies of the past few decades came from UK politicians, not Europe, where the elites were always very open about the real nature of their project.
The chaotic way in which we are belatedly disengaging from the EU, the fact that it is happening in such a sub-optimal, almost embarrassing way, is thus no surprise. It is an almost inevitable outcome of a blighted polity, one that confirms rather than contradicts the pro-brexit case. Extricating ourselves will be painful. The deal won’t be as good as one negotiated from a position of strength by a team steeped in that sort of thing. But it is the only way we can break out of our decline and begin rebuilding.
Over time, this institutional rebirth and the return of widespread political literacy will make it easier for us to grasp the great questions facing our future. That is why, unlike many on the centre-right, I remain relatively upbeat. As long as Corbyn is kept out of Downing Street, the pieces will eventually fall into place. We will be forced to confront our failed welfare state, our crippling tax system, our inadequate education system. We will have no choice but to begin a real debate about security and international arrangements. We will, in other words, have grown up.