Is Britain ungovernable?

“Are we ungovernable?” asked Alastair Campbell as he and Rory Stewart examined the entrails of the government’s latest crisis. While any immediate coup seems to have been averted, there is a common notion that being in charge of the country is impossible. As we are threatened with possibly seven Prime Ministers in five years, it seems undeniable that we are unruly and even ungovernable. However, the truth is far worse. We live in a land with no shared expression of political identity. In short, there is no country to govern in the first place.

This might seem shocking, but it is a sadly unavoidable conclusion to be found when looking across modern Britain. The reason governments keep flailing is that they try to appeal to a sense of collective mission that does not exist. A third of the country’s landmass would be independent by now if the SNP’s economic case had been at all convincing. London is a different world from the rest of England, never mind the rest of the country. In the digital world, any national consciousness has been eroded, as we receive the shared diet American or Chinese algorithms provide. All this, and I haven’t used the word immigration. Our system acts on the presumption we are a demos which although divided has a universal will towards the future. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Many will point to the Monarchy, or the Houses of Parliament, or worse, Edmund Burke, or even worse, evoke T. S. Eliot’s secluded chapel to try to imagine some ever-changing but ever-constant national lineage. This is a mirage. Societal changes are so complete that, never mind the Ship of Theseus, Trigger’s broom isn’t a worthy analogy.

Most people have given up on politics being anything more than a zero sum game, but they still want to win

The above may seem needlessly apocalyptic, but the truth is that as long as living standards rise and we deem our lives to be improving through consumerism, etc., most people don’t mind it at all. Only in an environment following a sustained period of minimal economic growth does this identity deficit become widespread in the body politic. Most people have given up on politics being anything more than a zero sum game, but they still want to win.

The mistake the last few governments have made is that they have tried to govern for everyone. Boris “got Brexit done” but increased immigration; Starmer raised taxes on business and cut immigration. British political machinery is totalising when the political realities are the opposite. Some, like Allister Heath, who tried to answer this question of whether we are ungovernable in December, suggested, “we need to rebuild our sense of nationhood.” The correct answer is more decisive. Government has been built on managing compromise, but in the future it will be based on directly benefiting the governing coalition’s voters.

The historian Louis Namier famously ascribed the politics of 18th-century Britain to purely “self-interest” — from voters to MPs to ministers and so on. In his eyes, personal gain was the true engine of the events of the period. Now this is magnified tenfold. Across every aspect of society, politics has become a game of tribute, where fragments of the population ask for more money from a disconnected state in order to mitigate the many problems that affect society. As has been stated in this publication, the price mechanism is governed by politics, not economics.

This situation is worst of all for the middle classes, who are squeezed the most but are hopelessly divided. This is no new thing. De Tocqueville wrote of 1848 that “the middle class never forms a compact body in the heart of the nation, a part very distinct from the whole; it always participates a little with all the others, and in some places merges into them.” Brexit made this far worse. All people really want is for the nation to be as it was in 2000, but the blame is divided between the richest, immigrants and Brexiteers, making any genuinely elitist politics impossible.

On immigration, there are significant majorities for restrictive measures, but the very fact that Farage, an architect of Brexit, would deliver them makes their enactment anathema. This lack of political organisation has led to a higher tax burden and fewer opportunities for their children, but, for now, there is no end in sight.

In his work What Is the Nation?, the political philosopher Ernst Renan famously said a nation was a “daily plebiscite.” In Britain today, a different question rules politics: “Who are the British people?” The key to the next election will be whoever can corral the most people around their answer to that question.