One of the last books I read before I started university in 2001 was Jonathan Freedland’s 1998 polemic Bring Home The Revolution, a call for a federalised British republic with new civic institutions reinvigorated by the robust localist and democratic traditions of the USA. Based on Freedland’s four years as a Washington correspondent in the mid-1990s — perhaps some of the most carefree and self-confident years in American history — it is now a pre-9/11, pre-Great Awokening period piece. It expresses an unabashed admiration for the American way of life from a left-liberal perspective, and suggests that Britain, like its daughter nation, should have elected judges, elected police chiefs, and powerful, accountable local government. It belongs to the era of the first two seasons of The West Wing.

I’ve gone back and forth on its core arguments ever since. But there was something undoubtedly valuable in Freedland’s straightforward attempt to reimagine the whole basis of a political settlement. Sometimes it is necessary to consider, from first principles, whether a system of government is actually working towards desirable ends — justice, peace, liberty, security — or whether it needs to be fundamentally overhauled. In the words of the US Declaration of Independence, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e. of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

… the standard British conservative faith in the self-evident superiority of our approach is wearing thin

Nearly two hundred and fifty years later, this remains an explosive insight. More traditionally-minded Tories tend to view it with a certain patrician condescension, making arch remarks about “rebel colonists” and extolling the benefits of the Ancient British Constitution, with its fine balancing of democracy and aristocracy, meritocracy and the hereditary principle. And of course those famous Philadelphian lines have their difficulties — who are The People? Does such a thing even exist? By what authority and by what mechanisms do they act?

Nevertheless, the standard British conservative faith in the self-evident superiority of our approach is wearing thin. We are encouraged by Burkean conservatives to trust in institutions, especially long-standing ones like the Church of England, Parliament, the police and the judiciary. To attack these pillars of British life is to cease to be conservative, supposedly. Searching questions about the overall legitimacy and authority of the state are simply ruled out of court. 

In contemporary Britain, however, this feels like an increasingly complacent approach. The borders are, if not entirely open, then absurdly porous, with well over three million people, more than one twentieth of the population, having arrived in the country legally in the last four years. Another hundred thousand have arrived illegally, and are being comfortably housed and looked after at a cost of five or six billion pounds a year. The police seem much more concerned with political objectives and management of community relations than upholding the law without fear or favour, to the extent that con men operate in public a hundred yards from Parliament, almost literally under the windows of the Metropolitan Police headquarters. Many local councils are close to bankruptcy because of the hugely expensive statutory obligations piled on them by laws made at Westminster. The state’s basic obligation to keep the streets safe is being crippled by human rights legislation, which makes it almost impossible to deport many serious criminals. The law gives huge power to judges to determine how much corporations and city councils can pay different people doing different jobs, and obliges taxpayers’ money to be given to rappers who explicitly despise Britain. The calibre of MPs, and hence the calibre of debate and reflection in the Commons, is in steep decline. Universities and schools, and other educational institutions like galleries and museums, have taken it upon themselves to instruct pupils and students in the tenets of an anti-national and ultimately nihilistic ideology of deconstruction and oikophobia.    

Any institution is only as reliable or effective as the people within it, and the culture that animates them

Taken together, these crises represent not simply normal political problems but a sustained breakdown in the proper functioning of the state. Any institution is only as reliable or effective as the people within it, and the culture that animates them, and the constraints under which they operate. If the people and the culture and the constraints are dysfunctional, then the institution will also eventually be dysfunctional. And while it is possible to reform organisations, the purpose of a system is what it does, as the theorists say. The British establishment as a system is currently destroying the longer-term viability of the United Kingdom as a functioning self-governing nation state, and the coherence of the British people as a peaceful and orderly society. Many official bodies prioritise self-promotion and EDI rigmarole over competence and service, and are bizarrely touchy about criticism from the people who pay their wages — the police are the classic example, but civil servants, teachers, and even the armed forces are getting in on the act. 

The result of these attitudes is that many people became alienated from the organisations in question, and disinterested in their ultimate fate. In light of all this, squeamishness about a wholesale re-examination of our methods of government and administration starts to look like a decadent aesthetic pose, rather than a serious engagement with modern realities. 

One of the key reasons why I, as a 2016 Remainer, am almost entirely reconciled to Brexit is that leaving the EU represents the opportunity for a re-assertion of the political, that is to say of governments using their democratic legitimacy to take decisive action in line with the national interest and public priorities, unhindered by excessive interference by judges, the quangocracy, “stakeholders” or international busybodies. In a somewhat different and more sophisticated form, this was the pro-Leave argument made some years ago by the distinguished Marxist Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books. 

It is the “depoliticization” of government and public bodies, the draining away of their power and their authority to courts and arm’s length bodies and to ethics watchdogs, that is a huge part of the crisis of legitimacy that the British state now faces. Perhaps we need to take the advice of 1998-vintage Jonathan Freedland, and ask ourselves afresh the old, resounding questions about power, authority, and the right to rule that so animated the US Founding Fathers — who saw themselves, let us recall, as re-asserting an ancient and venerable English tradition of liberty and self-government.