The Strange Death of British Liberalism? A Post-Brexit Comment

Anyone who considers themselves a liberal voice in Britain should be deeply troubled by the current political situation.

The triumphant 52% - 37% of eligible voters – are now in the ascendancy and will be tentatively observing the coming months, hoping that their hopes will be fulfilled by a new political agenda. The rise in hate crimes is truly shocking, with an objectionable minority believing they now have a mandate for deeply divisive attitudes. The government’s commitment to leaving the EU brings to a decisive head the divisive debate over Europe – one that has consumed the Conservative Party for the last 30 years. Theresa May’s tenure as Prime Minister will surely be dominated by a tug-of-war between the interests of the 37%, and those of powerful business interests who seek assurance that Britain will retain an openness towards Europe (in the short-term, of course – it is fallacious to argue that Britain will cease to trade freely with Europe in the long-run). Many are left worrying, rightly, who will advance a liberal case moving forward.

Brexit has brought to fruition a new paradigm shift in British politics that challenges existing political alignment – recently argued for by The Economist. The British obsession with Left Vs. Right, an anachronistic pedagogical device bequeathed to us by the ideological battles of the last century and guilty of misrepresenting political positions, is now being displaced by a division between those who value an openness to those who clamour for greater control over socio-economic processes – captured perfectly by the Brexit mantra, ‘take back control’.

Those who feel trapped and significantly unfree by the accelerated economic transformation of the last 40 years have made their voices heard in the face of what they perceived as ignorant establishment interests, who largely attacked them as being ‘racists’ or economically illiterate. Whilst many have defended voting Leave on democratic principles, we should be under no illusion that the key driver was a perceived lack of control over immigration, particularly the perception of increased insecurity and opportunity. For those aggrieved by what they view as a neoliberal world run in the interests of international capital, the populism of Farage and Johnson outweighed the reputation of the much disparaged ‘experts’ – particularly economists and EU constitutional lawyers. How can a self-proclaimed liberal society, one which claims to be the very birth place of modern liberalism in its moral and political sense, arouse this level of suspicion and disillusionment?

This divide is not something new. It takes us back to another age of great transformation seen during the 19^th century. To anyone familiar with the eponymous work of a largely unknown Austrian economist, Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1944), this should be of no surprise. Polanyi identified that the initial economic transformation during the industrial revolution was counteracted later in the 19^th century by a retrenchment of traditional values by those who felt powerless to preserve their existing way of life – the so called ‘double-movement’. This was the background for a shift in understanding of the very concept of freedom, which was the intellectual backdrop to ‘New Liberalism’. This suggests that a renewal in how we understand economic freedom is now required.

For anyone who cares about British Democracy and the liberal tradition of government accountability, there exists a disturbing question: where is the opposition? Whilst both political parties seem to be straddling this new divide, there is no doubt that it is the Labour Party who are facing immediate political disintegration.

Although many of his followers argue that he was set up to fail, it is clear to everyone else that Jeremy Corbyn has failed to convince those who voted Leave – whom he seemingly tried to reach out to when he was elected a year ago - that there was a hopeful alternative to the status quo. Corbyn was elected as an anti-establishment figure, yet he failed to fully commit himself to either side of the debate (perhaps due to his notorious personal ambivalence towards the EU). He even undermined his own Economic Advisory Committee by disputing the economic impact of a Leave vote. His refusal to resign in the face of 80% of the Parliamentary Labour Party voting no confidence in him - and the on-going Leadership election – is responsible a gaping hole where Her Majesty’s Opposition should have been holding to account the government of the day for perhaps the most remarkable acts of economic self-harm in British political history.

This is deeply alarming. At one of the most important junctures for Britain’s future, there is no effective challenge to those with the power to shape our future. A working opposition is one of the fundamental tenets of an effective British liberal democracy, and there is surely much to be lost from the inability of Corbyn to assemble an alternative government. The fact that the next largest party in parliament are the SNP, who emphatically do not represent the interests of the majority who voted remain, adequately captures this unprecedented situation.

Crucially, there is an absence of a credible liberal vision self-enablement for Britain to challenge the pull of populism, feeding off disillusionment and a lack of self-fulfilment. This is epitomised by the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ – which failed to convince those very people it was targeted at (see last post). 

The fact that Brexit occurred is therefore not surprising. But the fact that Remainers continually misunderstand the causes of such disillusionment, demonstrated by the pitifully sober campaign, is in contrast dumbfounding. Unless these concerns are addressed by a hopeful and clear vision of the future which understands the nature of disillusionment and reassesses the essence of freedom in the modern world – rather than throwing money at such issues or succumbing to divisiveness – the future of British Liberalism looks bleak.