The left is intellectually exhausted
Ironically, so-called progressives have absolutely failed to move with the times
In justifying his defection from the Conservative Party to Reform, Robert Jenrick expressed his frustration that many of his former Shadow Cabinet colleagues did not share his view that Britain was fundamentally “broken” when the question was put to them. Given the events surrounding this admission, it has been largely overlooked just what a damning indictment of the party that governed the country for fourteen of the last fifteen years it is for them to be having heated internal debates over whether they have left the country “broken”. Not struggling, or underperforming, or declining — completely broken.
The perception of Britain as broken is widespread with voters, with over three in four voters agreeing that Britain is broken in a poll last August. Given this deep and widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s politics following over a decade of rule by Britain’s (nominally) right-wing party, it would be natural to assume that the political left were in the ascendancy, capitalising on the rejection of the Conservatives’ deeply unpopular record. Surely Britain’s leftists have been winning people over with narratives of decline and renewal. After all, they had fourteen years to create them.
Well, not quite. The two parties currently polling highest are both firmly of the right, with Labour left languishing in third place. Instead of offering an optimistic vision on how to fix a broken Britain, or even a serious analysis of how it came to be broken, British left of centre politics — from its more moderate wings currently governing the country to its outer fringes — is suffering from complete intellectual exhaustion.
This is made all the more surprising considering the hegemonic dominance of the left within the country’s major institutions of knowledge production, most strongly within academia. Yet for all this dominance of the country’s once venerated academic institutions, the left’s intellectual landscape is remarkably barren. It is yet to produce an accurate sociology for the Britain that has emerged this century, in which rapid demographic changes have rendered many previous social categorisations largely redundant. When attempting to explain why so many people feel like Britain is broken, the left shies away from an original interrogation of the changes that have taken place over the last few decades that have shaped and distorted the country’s economy. As covered by Chris Bayliss, Britain’s economy is increasingly run by diktats, legal requirements and opaque subsidies that have crushed the market mechanism and obscured price signals. Instead of having an economy driven by private profit, Britain has engineered one intended to satisfy a variety of social objectives, be they inclusion of certain minorities, wealth transfers to selected groups, environmental goals, regional rebalancing, and so on. What many on the left claim as their objective — an economy geared towards meeting social needs rather than generating profit — is one that Britain is long down the road in trying to create. The result is that most people now think their country is broken.
Instead of reckoning with the ways in which the implementation of social obligations have caused economic disfunction, the left conveniently ignores the erosion of the market economy, falling back on an analysis of Britain’s malaise that bovinely repeats buzzwords — neoliberalism, financialization, market fundamentalism — from two generations ago, regardless of how meaningless they have since become. With such an outdated analysis, it is no wonder that the solutions proposed are also those of generations passed. Rent control, wealth taxes, renationalisation, more corporate regulation — the Big Ideas the left now touts as the way to fix Britain are simply a rerun of the ones that were discredited a few decades ago, though we are promised that somehow perhaps this time it will be different.
Just as the left has failed to provide a cogent analysis of the economic trends of the last decades, so too has it failed to understand the enormous impact of demographic changes wrought by mass migration. Opposition to immigration has been treated as a pathology to be deconstructed or explained away rather than a rational political position, with adherents to such views categorised either as unwitting victims of false consciousness, or irredeemable bigots cruelly lashing out due to their own failings. National identity is treated as an anachronism, something the left always assumed would naturally dissolve away as class identification superseded such confused and artificial divisions. When the left has approached British national identity, it has been either to deconstruct it as artificial and therefore implicitly invalid, or to scold it for its association with perceived historic wrongdoings and upholding the categorical evils of white supremacy, colonialism, racism, and so on.
Britain is indeed confused about its own national identity, having never properly interrogated what it meant to be British once the Empire had dissolved and its settler colonies gone on to develop national identities of their own. Since the turn of the century, multiculturalism was imposed from above as the guiding light of Britain’s post-Imperial identity. There was no rigid definition of Britishness, no need to be of a certain ancestry or even to have been born in the country. A piece of paper declaring one British would suffice, with adherence to a set of vague liberal values preferable but not mandatory. But demographic developments have rendered this vague definition unsustainable. Much to the left’s consternation, older conceptions of national identity tied to ancestry have been growing in popularity despite a concerted effort by all organs of the state to convince people otherwise. So what is the left’s response? What convincing alternative do they put forward? “Mr Blobby patriotism” and a conception of British identity centred on TV adverts and fart jokes.
Such a profound failure to confront the realities of modern-day Britain means that the left will continue in its failure to deliver in government and form a coherent understanding of why it keeps failing. Instead of taking this moment to look outwards to the country and offer a constructive vision, the British left can offer only a continued project of deconstruction of Britain’s institutions and passing obsessions with global social movements — climate, Black Lives Matter, Gaza — that elicit flashes of fanatic zealotry before being dropped and forgotten. Perhaps before continuing to misdiagnose why Britain is broken, the left would do well to look inward and analyse why it too has ended up intellectually broken.
