The right-wing pro-Brexit faction of the Conservative party which controls the UK Government seems to be taking a lot of leaves out of the playbook of Movement Conservatives in the US.
Britain’s unelected Brexit Minister Lord Frost loomed from newspaper pages reporting his speech threatening the EU over the deal he negotiated, as I read Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘How the South won the Civil war’ on a train today. Much of Frost’s and his colleagues’ rhetoric seems unreasonable, designed to inflame rather than reduce tension. It seems in Richardsons’ telling, that is a well-worn tactic of the US right.
In the 1950s, Movement Conservatives moved away from the Enlightenment notion that politics in a democracy should or would be influenced by reasoned debate. William Buckley in 1951 castigated the belief as a mere superstition - he pioneered an alternative approach by misrepresenting the views of the professors who disagreed with him and smearing them. This tactic was echoed by Joseph McCarthy and Robert Taft.
Instead of using reason, Movement Conservatives use narrative, appealing to people’s emotions, especially anger, caricaturing their opponents and turning them into figures that threaten American values, the American way of life. They have constituted the term ‘Liberal’ as it is currently understood.
Movement Conservatives draw on characters like the archetypal US cowboy, the rugged white individual who only wants to be free from interference by the state - although these figures and stories are chimeras.
In Western states made rich by the tax dollars poured into the military-industrial complex in the post-war years, white Republicans claimed they were bootstrapping their way to success while any attempts to defend the rights of minorities was overweening state interference. It was the same story in the aftermath of the Civil War.
In 1980 Ronald Regan told Americans: “Government is not the solution to our problems, Government is the problem.” He added to the right-wing narrative with personas like the black welfare queen who steals tax handouts, recast abortion as infanticide, and majored on the rugged cowboy - meanwhile, in reality, under his rule tax cuts, welfare cuts, and attacks on the unions increased inequality to historic levels and hollowed out the middle class.
In 1990 Republican leader Newt Gingrich produced a guide for Republicans urging them to refer to opponents with words like “decay, failure, sick, corrupt, pathetic, liberal, traitors”
1996 Fox News created - news in name only - sets were designed to look like a newsroom but there were no reporters. It was an arena for right-wing idealogues to pontificate. Richardson quotes a think tank VP who explained at the time that there was a window of ideas the public would accept. “To move that window rightwards, believers had to promote fringe ideas aggressively until they became acceptable. Fox News moved the Overton window to the right with a constant stream of media chatter about creeping socialism and the assault by minorities and women on American freedom.”
In 2000, Al Gore lost the US election despite winning more votes than his opponent. That case was decided against a background of deliberate voter suppression directed mainly at black voters with barriers like photo ID. (Voter ID is of course being introduced currently in the UK). An investigation by the US Commission on Civil Rights of that election revealed an “extraordinarily high and unacceptable level of voter disenfranchisement” particularly of African Americans. “To elect your party’s candidate’, Roger Stone told reporters; ‘it’s attack attack attack’ “.
In 2010, REDMAP, a “redistricting” project redrew boundaries of Republican areas to such effect that in 2012, despite the Democrats winning the White House, the Senate and more than a million more votes for House candidates, Republicans won a majority of 33 seats in the House of Representatives.
As the unfolding story of US politics shows, It can be hard to counter emotional, persona-based, narrative politics where what is said is very far from what is happening in reality, with reasoned debate. It is like someone talking quietly to a panto horse on a unicycle juggling flaming torches - no viewer is going to remember what was said.
We saw this in the Brexit debate with the famous “350 million a week for the NHS” on the side of a bus and the poster showing long queues of Turkish immigrants and the words ‘Breaking Point” - neither of these were true but any attempt to discuss it just seemed to give the erroneous claims more publicity.
We have seen it since this UK Government was elected, with the Government packing the House of Lords, introducing voter ID, increasing police powers, putting placemen on the boards of cultural institutions - “attack, attack, attack”. At the same time, it has been pushing a narrative that immigrants reduce workers’ wages - as if there is a finite amount of work to be done in a static economy. With fewer immigrants, they say wages will go up - they will, but so will inflation and the economy will shrink because stuff that people could usefully do won’t get done.
The right’s story is that supporting the rights of minorities threatens the white working-class - Dick can’t get a doctor's appointment because there are too many immigrants. (Of course, the reality is that a lot of health workers were EU migrants, many of whom have now left).
Right now, as I write this, farmers in the UK are starving pigs because mass abattoirs - which were overwhelmingly staffed by EU migrants who have left the country - are set up to deal with animals of a certain size and if they get too big while awaiting slaughter, the farmers will have to kill and incinerate them themselves - and yet “nobody talks about Brexit in London any more,” a friend confidently assured me at the weekend. “It’s a done deal.” Is it?
The UK Government also seems to be deliberately picking a fight with French fishermen after refusing most licenses they have historically been granted to fish in UK waters.
Now Frost is threatening the EU with the shadowy figures of Ulster Loyalists. But surely Frost is the one who sold them down the river with the deal he negotiated and signed? It all seems quite mad.
The whole Brexit project was prosecuted with a reckless disregard for its effect on the peace and prosperity of the whole island of Ireland and particularly on peace in Northern Ireland. This must make the people of that island angry - I know it makes me angry when I think of the cynical way a hard Brexit was pushed through in the midst of a pandemic, and of its effect particularly on our already beleaguered NHS and care staff.
But anger seems to be the response that hands the most energy to the people who are trying to undermine the notion of reasoned debate. Better, perhaps, to redouble our efforts to have calm and respectful conversations. We can only hope that at some point the panto horse will fall off the unicycle or set itself on fire. At some point, presumably, as reality diverges too much from the ‘story’, people will wake up, smell the roasted dandelion roots and realise that what they are being served is not coffee.
Further reading
How the South Won the Civil War, by Heather Cox Richardson
“Boris Johnson delivers a flimsy package of anti-business boosterism” - Camilla Cavendish in the FT
A very good read Jackie. Of the many issues caused by Brexit the most chilling for me is the situation in the North of Ireland. How quickly it is forgotten the real danger of playing fast and loose there ... and that is exactly what they are doing ... it’s a dangerous ploy whichever way you twist and turn it. I think they simply do not care if I’m honest as perhaps they are the unification of Ireland as a case of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’.
I got some feedback from the friend quoted in the article - she meant that people in London don't reprise the arguments of the Brexit referendum but they do express dismay about its effects. She said "London voted against Brexit and is tired of relitigating it. So Londoners do not discuss 'Brexit right or wrong'. They take its wrongness for granted. However talking about how to deal with the damaging EFFECTS of Brexit is exactly what people DO talk about now ie labour shortages in abattoirs, care homes, supply chains. So you've set up a false contradiction between my point and your point to imply that the confident Londoner you mention is complacent about effects. "