Post-factualism

British voters have made a choice that defies logic. The reasons for this are more complex than they appear. And they are very worrying

The British voters have made a rotten decision. Worse, they have consigned leadership of their country to vocal but foolish people who cannot build but only destroy, and have no idea what to do next.  As The Economist said on June 27, the UK is rudderless, with no-one willing to take responsibility for the decision or its consequences. Predictably, all my friends’ Facebook walls and Twitter feeds are full of comments about how bloody stupid the Brexit voters are.

The Full English. With beans

I resent this. As I explained in my previous piece, I was a Brexit supporter myself only a few years ago, and I refuse to accept that everyone who voted that way is a thick bastard. The unfair voting system in Britain means that most people are effectively disenfranchised and this was their only chance to protest. There has also been a feeling that English identity is denigrated. This is not imaginary. There’s a pic doing the rounds on social media today that shows lots of supposedly delicious European food on one side, and on the other, a solitary can of baked beans. I grew up on a traditional British diet, and my mother was a wonderful cook. I found the picture offensive. Racism is the big taboo of the liberal – unless it is against the English (or the Americans). That, it seems, is OK. So I understand why people voted Out.

That does not mean it was a good idea. And as Huffpost and others have reported, the Leave vote has led to a perceptible uptick in harassment and hate crime, with EU nationals (and non-white British people) being screamed at and asked when they are going home. This won’t, in the end, protect British or English identity; it will destroy it. As a German friend pointed out in a sincere and decent blog post (A Letter to English Racists) on June 27, for Germans, the racist crimes of one generation undermined the sense of identity of those that followed.

Moreover, while I can’t condemn Brexit voters wholesale, they should not be wholly off the hook. They are not all racist bigots, of course. But they have accepted lies and ignored facts, just as Germans did in the 1930s. Within 24 hours of the vote Leave leader Daniel Hannan staggered the BBC’s Evan Davis by admitting frankly on air that Brexit wouldn’t stop free movement from the EU, at least not if we want access to the single market. Meanwhile Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph on June 26 that: “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down.” But this won’t be possible unless EU nationals can do the same in Britain. So either Johnson is lying, or this bitter referendum has been for nothing. As for the claim that pulling out would give us an extra £350 million a week to spend on the NHS, Nigel Farage now admits that won’t happen (and anyway, the figure was spurious).

But what is important is not that the Brexit leaders lied. It is that the facts did not matter. Michael Gove said the country was fed up with “experts”.  When the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that there could be a big financial black hole in the event of a Brexit, Nigel Farage said it was biased because it was part-funded by the EU. The IFS does get about 10% of its funding from the European Research Council, but this is a highly reputable funding agency and five of its grant recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.  Anyone with Internet access could have found this out in five minutes, as I did. They didn’t bother. Let it be said, Cameron and Osborne were at it as well – as Peter Oborne pointed out back in May. But for barefaced lying, the Brexiteers took the biscuit.

Why did the voters not call them out on this?

Post-factualism
The answer is something very dangerous – post-factual politics. It’s a phrase that has been flying around in the US with regard to the Trump campaign, but the idea has been around for a while. As writer and former Sanders aide David Sirota wrote in the Huffington Post back in 2007 (Welcome to the Post-Factual Era): “Why is politics the only arena where those who turned out to be right still get flayed as outcasts, while those who are known to be utterly wrong get rewarded as visionaries? In business, if you make the wrong calls, you lose money and, most often, lose your job. ...In politics, it generally works the opposite way. The people who make the right call ... are punished with elite vitriol, and those who repeatedly make the wrong calls are vaulted into the highest echelons of the Establishment. ...Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Iraq War.” Sirota says this is “to do with where the money and power is.” He is part-right. But there is something else here. Politics has moved online and few people now engage politically face-to-face.  

The morning after the vote, I wrote the following on my Facebook page: “All the people moaning all over social media this morning should ask what they themselves could have been doing to prevent this disaster. With one exception, nobody I know has.” I then pasted an extract from a piece I had written three years earlier (actually after the death of Thatcher).  It was as follows:

In a 2008 Guardian article, Vernon Bogdanor pointed out that when Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 it had a membership of about 1.5 million; 30 years later it was down to 145,000. Labour underwent a similar decline between 1996 and 2008, from 400,000 to 150,000. In the 1950s one Briton in 11 had belonged to a political party; now just one in 88 did. Voter turnout, well over 80% in 1974, dropped to just 59% in 2001 (it has since recovered a little). ...There is an increasing disinclination to take part in the mainstream democratic process.

“This might be a good time to stop writing "Oh God I'm ashamed to be British" on your wall, and start thinking about how things change,” I added.

But why should politics on the Internet not be politics? Must we really go out on a wet winter night and huddle in a church hall somewhere with about four other people we don’t much like, arguing?

Yes, we must. 

The disputed view
We have lost the facility to argue, debate and reach consensus; we see only those arguments that accord with our own. This is true of me as much as almost everyone else; virtually none of my friends backed Brexit – yet the fact is, many other people on the Left did. But because they do not belong to the same social circles as me, I am not hearing their arguments. Had I been to a bunch of Labour Party meetings over the last six months, I would have done.  Nearly 40 years ago, as chairman of my university Liberal party, I travelled to Blackpool for a special party conference, to debate the arrangement the party then had with Callaghan’s Labour administration (not a coalition; it was basically confidence and supply). Several of our delegation were determined to end this arrangement. Halfway through a speech by the then Liberal Leader David Steel, a friend turned to me and said, “He’s right. I’ve changed my mind.” And so did I.

Would that happen now? Would we hire a draughty railway carriage and have it shunted from train to train to get to Blackpool, then listen to arguments for and against and make a decision?  Most of the people ranting about Brexiteers on my Facebook wall would not do so, and have not acquired the skills one needs to make a fellow-voter think again.

It goes deeper. Even 60 years ago, Party members were a minority, albeit a much bigger one. But people were still exposed to more debate than they are now.  For a start, they didn’t spend every evening in. Now they likely do. In December 2014 the Institute of Economic Affairs reported that the number of pubs had dropped from 58,000+ to 48,000 since 2006, a decline of nearly a fifth in just eight years.  There are a number of reasons for this decline; the IEA has ascribed it to the smoking ban, a decline in beer drinking as opposed to wine (the latter was expensive when I was young), increasing alcohol duty and more. Whatever is driving the drop in pub-going, however, it is a loss to democracy. I spent much of my misspent youth fishing cigarette-packets out of pools of beer while the person opposite me told me I was talking shit and made me defend what I had just said.

Social engagement: Central London, 1983

This is not just about pubs, or political parties. In January 1995 Robert D. Putnam published a paper called Bowling Alone. Later developed into a book, the paper posited that the propensity of people to associate with one another in civic fora was a key to a healthy democracy and to good governance. It was a thesis Putnam developed more fully in his famous (for academics) book Making Democracy Work, which examined the success of local government in northern and southern Italy. Civic engagement, said Putnam, was in decline. “The number of Americans who report that ‘in the past year’ they have ‘attended a public meeting on town or school affairs’ has fallen by more than a third (from 22 percent in 1973 to 13 percent in 1993). Similar (or even greater) relative declines are evident in responses to questions about attending a political rally or speech, serving on a committee of some local organization, and working for a political party.”

Putnam suggested several reasons why this was happening. Greater participation by women in the workforce had reduced the time they had for (for example) parent-teacher associations. However, he found that men’s attendance in civic fora had also declined. Putnam pointed to online shopping replacing the corner store (a decline in human contact), the growth of the VCR and, particularly, TV. “The new ‘virtual reality’ helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests?”

Should we blame TV? Putnam himself admits that changes to people’s living environment, for example slum clearance, are also a factor, breaking up social networks. This will also have been a factor in Britain, where the built environment has changed immeasurably since 1945. Indeed, as far back as 1934, T.S. Eliot could write (in The Rock):

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads

And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor

Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance.

...Nor does the family even move about together.

But every son would have his motorcycle,

And daughters ride away on casual pillions. 

Slacktivism
But although TV may have kept people at home, historically, in Britain at least, it recreated the space for dispute and discussion. The BBC has always been required to reflect “balance” in its news coverage, and ITV also inherited this obligation when it started broadcasting in 1955. At that time there were only two TV channels; a third (BBC2) arrived in 1964 and a fourth (Channel 4) in 1982, but they were bound by the same strictures. Moreover the fact that there were few viewing options meant that there was a national conversation.  

This was certainly the case in the European referendum of 1975. In particular, two days before the vote, millions watched the Oxford Union debate between Edward Heath and Jeremy Thorpe on one side, and Peter Shore and the great Barbara Castle on the other. Castle (who spoke for Out) later felt that she had been a failure, but I remember the debate 41 years later, and I suspect I am not alone. To be sure, one shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about the quality of the 1975 argument (as this piece from Prospect demonstrates). But was there an event like the Union debate this time, in which the main players were picked up upon what they said, and made to defend it? I didn’t feel there was.

To an extent, this reflects a decline in the quality of the political class. That of 1975 understood history because they’d been part of it. Heath had taken part in the Normandy landings and seen the destruction in Europe. Castle had been brought up in the North during the Depression and her mother ran a soup-kitchen.  Cameron, by contrast, has never worked outside politics, and a growing number of the political class are the same.  But there is something else going on here: Slacktivism.

There are a few definitions of this, but broadly, it’s the use of social media to express one’s views, followed by a feeling that one has done what one can. In fact, posting on Facebook and “liking” posts about racism require no real commitment. Or risk; I am just old enough to remember the civil rights and Vietnam protests in the US. The cost to those who took part, and the fear involved, could be high. (If anyone doubts this, they can watch the remarkable documentary Freedom Riders – a story of a time when activists, African-American but also some white middle-class liberals, did more than just click ‘like”, and were threatened and beaten for their pains.) No problem now. Click Like and all your friends will roar approval, because, of course, your friends mostly share your views. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.

Just how this works was described very well by sociologist Joel Busher in his excellent recent book on the English Defence League, The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest. A recurrent theme through the book is the way in which activists’ beliefs, lifestyles and relationship reinforce another. Much of this happens online. It is as true of people like me, on the Left, as it is of the EDL. There are no more draughty church halls. There are no more cigarette packs soaked in slops. No-one need watch Newsnight anymore. Politics has become a dialogue of the deaf. No-one who does not share my views will hear my arguments, and I will not hear theirs.

This is why we had a disaster last Thursday. All the information about the consequences of this vote was available beforehand; the threat to the Northern Ireland peace process, the fact that we would still have to have free movement of people (or limited access to EU markets), the fact that the UK might break up, that the pound would fall, that markets (and thus pensions) would have millions of pounds wiped off their value; it was all there. But no-one thought of these facts when they went to vote. They had felt no need to acquaint themselves with them.  People’s interactions are now grouped in vertical silos, into which no information may enter from any source that they have not chosen. It has thus never been easier to manipulate people, for they are complicit in their own deception.

Few people outside Britain welcomed the Brexit vote, but those who did included Marine Le Pen and Greece’s Golden Dawn. “A direct consequence of Brexit will be the empowerment of patriotic and nationalist forces across Europe,” said Golden Dawn’s spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris.

I can hear the drip, drip, drip of factoids being fed into those vertical silos right now. It’s the Poles. They’re scrounging bastards. They’ve taken your job. Those bastards. It’s the Romanians. It’s the Tutsis. It’s the Gypsies. It’s the Jews. The Jews. The Jews. The Jews.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads

Cameron’s next five years: A rubbish prospect - for Cameron?

Thursday’s British election results are a genuine achievement for British Prime Minister David Cameron. Expected to lose, or at best be forced into a coalition, he has instead won a small but workable majority. But he may yet regret it.  Here are my cut-out-and-keep predictions for the next five years. Look at them in 2020 and see if they’ve come true

On April 8 1992, I sat in a friend’s Volkswagen Golf, touring through the streets of London’s Lambeth. We’d chosen it because it had a sunroof; if it was open, you could clip a loudspeaker to its edge, if it wasn’t raining (it wasn’t; it was a delightful spring evening). We toured the estates south of Vauxhall Cross and The Oval, pouring out our message. My friend was driving; as a former traffic broadcaster with a very deep voice, I had the mike. I can’t remember exactly what I was saying. But I do remember cruising down the South Lambeth Road on the way home and emitting some banal remark or other along the lines of “Vote Labour”. As we approached the Stockwell Clock Tower, someone on the pavement yelled back: “Vote Labour, pay later, you arseholes”, or something similar – ah, the language of Shakespeare, Mill and Milton. We pulled into my friend’s street, one of those to the south of Clapham High Street where nice terrace houses were just starting to fetch a fortune. As I walked through his hall with an armful of PA equipment, I noticed his wife was watching that night’s feature film BBC1; Scandal, about the 1963 Profumo affair (about which more in a moment).

I didn’t take an active part in last night’s election, as I’m abroad (though I did vote). But I see striking parallels between last night’s events and those of April 1992.

One is the victory of a Tory leader who was expected to lose by a country mile. In 1992 John Major fought an unexpectedly vigorous campaign and earned my reluctant, but real, respect. He was always far too easy to dismiss. The son of a music-hall performer, he went into banking (someone once called him “the only man ever to run away from the circus to become an accountant”).  In office he was to give an impression of pragmatism and decency at the head of the Tory Party; a genial baboon attempting to save a shrill troupe of hyenas from self-destruction. Cameron isn’t quite the same. He is from a background of privilege, and embodies a sense of entitlement to leadership that Major never claimed for himself, or would have accepted in others. The parallels are strong nonetheless.

However, if I was David Cameron, I’d be wishing to God that I had not won this election. And not just because of the parallels with Major; there is more, much more. Here are six reasons why the next five years will be hell for the Tory party and why Cameron may eventually wish he’d been defeated.

II: Europe

The 1970 Conservative government took Britain into Europe without a referendum, which it had promised not to do. This undermined the project from the start. When Labour finally held one in 1975, British electors (including myself) voted yes to what we thought was a free-trade zone, little more. Since then there have been significant treaty revisions, yet our last chance to vote on the issue was so long ago that most of those who voted are dead. So there is an argument for this referendum. But it will be very dangerous for Britain. For Cameron, the referendum, and Europe in general, may prove lethal.

First, the failure of UKIP in the election means that a major outlet for anti-EU feeling on the Right has been removed. It will now be bottled up in the Tory party again. More than ever now, it will be torn apart by vicious internal arguments over Europe, just as it was under Major. This will lead to defections and backbench rebellions that a man with a small majority can’t afford. As Ken Clarke, one of the Tory party’s biggest Big Beasts, pointed out the  morning after the election, this was a small majority and could be whittled away. “It’s a great victory,” he said, but added: “It is tempting for factions to hold you to ransom. That is what happened to John Major.” 

The decision to hold a vote means it will be even worse for Cameron. There will be fractious, dangerous negotiations with Europe, and the Tory party will then divide on their results, with a large minority arguing that Cameron has brought too little back from Brussels. There will then be a referendum that results in the UK staying in the EU anyway but being far less influential in it than it was before. Its influence is already slipping away; it has taken little part in talks over Ukraine. In fact, this referendum is not so much Britain shooting itself in the foot, as blasting it with a howitzer. It will also seem perverse to our partners. Issues that need pan-European attention over the next five years will include a rising tide of desperate migrants, insecurity on Europe’s Eastern border, and periodic financial instability in the Eurozone. In this context, a  British attempt at renegotiation, and uncertainty over its membership, will be most unhelpful to everyone else. It’s likely they will tell us that, not politely.

III: Scotland

This election has demonstrated that partial federalisation doesn’t work, so Cameron will be the last PM of Britain as it is now; it will be dissolved on his watch, maybe altogether. 

The unexpected Tory majority means the Scottish question isn’t immediate.  In a hung parliament, the SNP would have had an effective veto over legislation that applied to the English and Welsh but not to its own electors (the so-called West Lothian question). This would have angered other British people and would have forced a constitutional response. The SNP won’t have this veto for now, and there are almost no other Scottish MPs; so for the moment, this question has been de-fanged. In fact the SNP members may be a positive presence at Westminster, bringing a fresh view to select and standing committees, and subjecting the government to lively scrutiny.

But if we go on with a Scotland that is partly devolved but still represented at Westminster, the West Lothian question will be back, and it’s not clear how it can be solved. Cameron promised “English votes for English people”; he will be held to this, and will find that he does not really know how to do it.  As long as Scotland stays in the UK, it is entitled to be represented in parliament. How, actually, do you decide what Scots MPs should and shouldn’t vote on, and who has the right to keep them out of the lobbies?  More immediately, the EU referendum in 2017 is not likely to take us out of Europe. But it might – a decision the Scots would not endorse. This could force a very sudden and messy separation.  

Even if this does not happen, Cameron’s government will face the growing desire of all people, including the English, for a clear identity in an era of globalisation. There is no sign that it has the imagination to see this. Yet it will be forced to confront it at some point in its term of office.

IV: A serious scandal

The Elm Guest House allegations have not yet been fully worked through, and there are serious allegations against a very senior former Tory cabinet minister. They have not been proved in court, and his friends strongly refute them.  Nonetheless, some of the rumours concerning both Elm House, and alleged sex parties and even killing connected with Dolphin Square, are very distressing. The smell of past sexual misconduct by senior figures is not going to go away.

For the moment, this is mostly rumour and allegation. But if it proves to be something more, it could undermine an administration already struggling with internal divisions over Europe and devolution. It would be seen by many as proof that Britain is run by a closed and corrupt clique.  

There are echoes of the  Profumo affair, which effectively brought down Tory PM Harold Macmillan in 1963, and helped cause his party’s defeat in the election of the following year.  It’s not quite the same, of course. Profumo had involved serious errors of judgement by a serving minister; the current allegations are historic, and do not involve Cameron’s own government in any way. On the other hand, the Profumo affair did not involve the alleged rape and possibly murder of children and its cover-up by the establishment.

V: The voting system

The Green Party got 400,000 more votes than the Scottish Nationalists on Thursday, but got one seat against the SNP’s 56. Put another way, the SNP got one seat per 26,000 votes, the Conservatives one per 34,500 votes, Labour one per 40,500 seats, the Liberal Democrats one per 295,000 votes, the Greens one seat for 1.1 million votes and UKIP one seat for 3.8 million votes. How can this possibly confer legitimacy upon the elected government?

To be sure, it's hard to say what the results would have been under PR. It depends on the type of PR system used; besides, the existence of such a system would itself change voting behaviour. However, the Mirror did a back-of-a-fag-packet estimate based on Thursday’s results and the outcome was a Tory-UKIP coalition, perhaps with the DUP. So be careful what you wish for.  Still, the current system is unjust, the question won’t go away in the next five years, and there will be great pressure for change.

VI: The excluded

I was in London through the London riots of 1981 and 1985, and was shocked by the riots of 2011. People heave bricks through windows when they feel they have no voice. (Also sometimes because they’re little sods who want new trainers; but they’re opportunists, not the people who start the trouble.)

There have been rumours for some weeks about a new tranche of welfare cuts that would have a direct impact on the poorest. According to the Guardian (May 5 2015), threats include increasing the bedroom tax, ending maternity benefit and even stricter tests for the unemployed sick before they can get benefits.  The latter will be especially controversial, given the number of alleged injustices that already take place. Everyone has heard the “dead man told to find work” stories; in 2013 the Public Accounts Committee reported that  38% - over a third –  of fitness-for-work decisions were being overturned on appeal, which strongly suggests that some of those stories are true.

Some of those hit by new cuts are unlikely to fight back, or at least to riot (carers, the disabled). Others will. The Guardian claims one of the proposals is to deny under-25s incapacity benefit or housing benefit. It’s not hard to imagine a more and more frustrated layer of young people forced to stay with families who no longer want them and cannot support them. This won’t be the proximate cause of disorder – it wasn’t in 2011, or 1985 – but it will pave the way. Prepare for bricks.

VI: A succession crisis?

No-one seems to have thought of this – after 63 years as head of state, the Queen may pass away during this parliament. That isn’t inevitable; she is 89 – her mother made 101. If it does happen, however, she will leave a huge vacuum, a succession crisis and constitutional turmoil.  Prince Charles is not disliked the way he was, and will probably succeed to the throne. But he will be less able to provide national cohesion than his remarkable mother. Moreover the passing of the Queen may show us the extent to which her personal popularity has protected an institution that is no longer as widely accepted as it was.  There will be a bitter, long-suppressed debate on the monarchy, its cost and its role, if any, in modern Britain.

It’s quite a list. Six potential nightmares: Europe, Scotland, historic sex abuse, a dysfunctional voting system, riots, and a sudden challenge to the monarchy. The first two of these are simply not avoidable. The next three probably aren’t, and the sixth is completely unpredictable.  

It would be wrong to say that I welcomed the Tory majority on Friday morning. I did not; it represented a dreadful lack of imagination and courage by the electorate. But maybe, just maybe, it’s Cameron who should regret this victory. After five years he will be left with a divided party, and a weakened and maybe truncated country that has little influence in Europe (or with the US, whose interests increasingly lie elsewhere). Meanwhile, those cheated by the electoral system will turn to forms of politics that lie outside it. Some of them will be negative and destructive. But others will not; watch the Greens. 

The Right did not, in the end, win last Thursday. What really happened was that the Ancien Regime missed its last chance to reform itself from within. The next five years are not going to be fun. What lies ahead is (to misquote W.G. Sebald) the creative history of destruction. What emerges from it will be a new and very different country, rediscovering its pre-imperial identity and finding a place for itself in a complex and changing world. But Cameron will be at best a deflated figure, rather as Major was in 1997. At worst, he will be reviled as a failure on the scale of Chamberlain and Lord North, and his party will be out of office for a generation.

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Mike Robbins’s latest book, Three Seasons: Three Stories of England in the Eighties, is available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Scribd and other online retailers, and can also be ordered from your local bookshop. 

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