I am not going to write yet again about the EU Referendum
today, or at least not directly, but rather about some reflections prompted by an
article that appeared in The Guardian today by John Harris which was about
the referendum but with a particular take. Harris, who is an invariably
interesting journalist by the way, argues that many inclined to vote to leave
the EU are reacting to having had huge and rapid social changes “imposed on
them”. They should not, therefore, be patronizingly dismissed as “irrational,
unhinged and gullible”.
Whether or not this is a valid reason for voting to leave the
EU is an open question, and as I say not what I want to discuss here. Rather,
it seems to me that the sentiment Harris is reporting is a variant of something
I discuss and criticise at length in the book (especially pp. 88-92): the idea
of a world in rapid, perhaps unprecedented, change which makes mandatory constant
organizational change. It is one of the many ways in which organizations and
politics are both connected and harmonic, something which is becoming a regular
theme of this blog.
What strikes me most is how unchanging these claims are, and
how they are both meaningful and meaningless. Harris is talking about the
period since Britain joined the EU, so the forty or so years since 1973. But in
1973, which I can just about remember (I was 8), similar sentiments were
expressed, and very vociferously too. The past, it seemed, was not just another
country but, in the past, we had been another country. The memories of war,
Empire, social cohesion and civility may have been refracted through the
lens of nostalgia but they had their counterpart in more objective analyses
of relative economic decline, shifting centres of geo-political power and
changing social norms.
It was common then to hear adults talking about how ‘the country
has gone to the dogs’, that ‘we won the war but we lost the peace’ and, though
I can’t recall hearing these exact words, that ‘I just want my country back’.
Some of this, as with the present EU debate, was about immigration but, also as
with the present EU debate, it was part of a more inchoate sense of unchosen
changes. Indeed it’s worth remembering that this kind of sentiment was a big
part of what lay*, a few years later, behind electoral support for Margaret Thatcher,
including her remarks
at the 1979 election campaign about British people feeling ‘swamped’ by
immigration. And yet people now are wont to say that immigration ‘used to be ok’,
even though their predecessors did not say anything like that at all.
So that sense of unchosen change isn’t new and perhaps this
means that it is actually itself rather patronizing to uncritically accept it
as an authentic, respectworthy sentiment. If anything it is just an
unremarkable truism: 2016 is different to 1973, just as 1976 was different to
1933 in all kinds of ways, most of which were not ‘chosen’ and could not
reasonably have been ‘asked’ about. Why would anyone expect otherwise? The
issue seems to lie more in a sense that this change is going somewhere
frightening or, perhaps most frightening of all, that it is going nowhere. It’s
this fearful sense of being lost in history that I want to explore.
Fear of redundancy, fear of being left behind, fear of being judged
unequal to the demands of change. That this fear is largely orchestrated through
an invocation of hordes of Asians and Slavs – or, in more politically
acceptable language, the challenge from the emerging economies of China, India
and Eastern Europe; or the anodyne ‘global
economic race’ – serves to underscore the perhaps not racist but certainly
racialised tang of contemporary stories about Britishness. We may have no clear
idea of what the future holds, but we are continually told that failure to
change will mean that the future will occur elsewhere, in a faraway country of
which we know little. There is therefore an easy translation from the
ubiquitous experience of change in the workplace to a fear of foreign
competition, and an easy translation from that to fear of foreigners in general
and immigration and European integration in particular.
It is indeed quite remarkable that the bullishness about
change in the organizational sphere has been so comprehensively unmatched in
other areas. The most charitable interpretation of British involvement in the
Iraq war is that it was animated by a desire to maintain the ‘special
relationship’ and to influence US policy – a desire which was a continuation of
British foreign policy since 1945 and which persists to the present day. New
Labour’s attitude to the EU, initially relatively conciliatory, later became rather
similar to that towards Old Labour: one of hectoring calls for modernization
and change in the face of global competition. The Coalition government after 2010
was relatively muted on the EU because of the presence of pro-EU Liberal Democrats
but the Conservative administration since 2015 is defined by degrees of hostility
to the EU relations. (Interestingly, these two foreign policy areas are in
conflict, since the US relation to the UK is refracted through the UK’s membership
of the EU, as President
Obama is beginning to make clear).
Back on the home front, immigration and asylum policies have
also been animated by fear. There is no doubt that New Labour were more relaxed
about multi-culturalism than was Thatcherism. And Cameron’s ‘Notting Hill’
conservatism has largely followed them in this, which in part explains the rise
of UKIP (which was not just fed by the EU issue but the sense that Cameron is
not a ‘real Conservative’ e.g. in terms of gay marriage legislation). Nevertheless,
across all recent governments policy in these areas has been draconian and it
is noteworthy that the case for tolerance has mainly been made in purely
economic terms – the economic need for immigration – so that it is in effect
inseparable from the mantra of change as an adjunct to global competitiveness.
There is no real suggestion that immigration is related to either our past
responsibilities as a colonial power or to our future possibilities as a
cosmopolitan society. It’s just an economic presence, bereft of past or future.
It would be unfair to ascribe this culture of fear solely to
the polity. It is also the case that any capacity to be positive about the
future is limited by the rabidity of a press where it is not just the tabloids
which are filled with blood-curdling stories of new causes for alarm. On
Europe, immigration, asylum, crime, terrorism, paedophilia as well as health,
climate change and, notoriously, house prices the media tell of a world to
which a cringing fearfulness is a quite reasonable response. Yet it is not a fear
of anything in particular, even if it attaches at moments to something specific.
A combination of rolling news and limited attention spans means that each fear
is registered, instantaneously forgotten and superseded by a new terror. What
endures is not any specific anxiety but a generalised neurotic dread. But
whilst fed by the media this climate has been able to flourish at least in part
because it fills the vacuum created by the political failure to articulate any compelling
future vision of ‘the good life’.
There is clearly a symmetry between the febrile atmosphere
engendered by the daily kaleidoscope of media-fuelled panics and the managerialized
politics and political managerialism in which ‘the only constant is change’. If
we want an image of contemporary Britain it would be of a person running in
terror away from an unseen yet omnipresent enemy, but running on a treadmill
rather than a road. Standing at the side is a sadistic personal trainer in the
form of politician, manager or journalist cajoling and bullying the runner to
go faster, to redouble the effort to go nowhere on pain of being engulfed by
the invisible demons which lie in wait for those who fail to keep up. The ‘global
race’ has no finishing line. It is a journey with no beginning, no end and no
purpose or meaning beyond its own self-fulfilling imperative to keep moving at
any cost.
This is not, as is conventionally supposed, because we** are
too wedded to the past but rather because we have too little sense of ourselves
as located within the past-present-future continuum which more truly
constitutes history. If, when I was a child, the problem was the weight of the
past then for the coming generation it is the weightlessness of the future. When
I was growing up, British identity was, unhappily and ultimately unsustainably,
that of an old person stuck in the past with memories of a great empire, a
heroic war, of glories lost. That is still discernible, but it is now much more
akin to someone with Alzheimer’s disease. Anyone who, as I have, has had the
misfortune of witnessing this condition will know that what makes it so
devastating is not simply that the sufferer recollects so little of the past
and is often over-attached to those distant fragments which are flickeringly
remembered. It is also that there is no conception of the future, and the
present is just a fear-filled moment of transitory but ever recurring change.
*Surprisingly
from a present-day perspective it also in part lay behind the decision to join what
was then the EEC in 1973. I can remember my highly Conservative – and conservative
– primary school headmistress inventing a song about a ‘beautiful dream’ as
part of a celebratory pageant of this event. I played – and I hope this will
amuse anyone reading this who knows me – one of the ‘gnomes of Zurich’,
then a slang term for Swiss bankers. Whether these gnomes were depicted
positively or negatively in the pageant I unfortunately can’t recall.
**By
‘we’ I mean ‘we British’ but similar things may well be true in other
countries. I think this is so in France, which I know quite well, and probably
in the US and elsewhere. Indeed something like what I have said here
seems to apply to US and is expressed by Donald Trump when, as in his now
notorious ‘ban
all Muslims’ speech he cried plaintively about the need to work out “what
the hell is going on?”. Obnoxious as it was, it did express this sense of ‘historical
lostness’ that I am trying to explore, and Trump’s popularity is surely a
consequence of that sense.
