Last week Peter Ramsay and Philip Cunliffe spoke at the 2023 Battle of Ideas festival in London about the lessons of Brexit. They argued that Brexit teaches us that if we are ever to take control of our state then we need an independent politics of nation-building. Here is what they said.
Peter Ramsay:
I am going to make five points.
First point: Brexit isn’t the disaster that the Remainers’ Project Fear predicted it would be.
We now know Britain’s growth record since Brexit is in the middle of the European pack. It’s sluggish, like the rest of Europe, but better than some big EU economies. Our fear-mongering liberal elites got it wrong. Who would have guessed it?
With that out the way, we can get down to business.
Second point: Brexit may not be a disaster, but it has nevertheless not delivered on the central demand of the Leave campaign in 2016. We have not ‘Taken back control…’
That slogan summed up the feeling of many British voters that we have no real influence on policies of government. A big part of that problem was being a member-state of the European Union. The EU created a cosmopolitan political world in which policies emerged from intergovernmental meetings, diplomatic conferences, the European treaties rather than from the effort of political parties to represent their voters’ interests.
Merely leaving the EU didn’t solve this problem however. We left and our governing class carried on as before: first we had lockdowns; then all the mainstream parties pushed Net Zero; mass immigration has grown larger than ever; and the entire political class is obsessed with wars in distant countries. These are all cosmopolitan commitments. The British people have no interest in them. And they only further undermine the state’s authority.
Fewer people than ever feel represented by the major parties.
Third point: If Brexit failed to achieve its democratic potential, this is not because of anything the EU did but because British politics wasn’t up to it.
In our book Taking Control we explain that the EU was never an external imposition on British politics as Eurosceptics thought it was. Britain’s membership of the EU was really the form of government that was necessitated by the internal decay of our political life as a nation; by the political void between the governing class and the citizenry.
Before 2016 most of us sensed this terminal political decay. But we could still pretend. After Brexit this utter decay of mainstream politics stands exposed for all to see.
In the book, we explain how all of Britain’s political traditions failed the challenge of national sovereignty posed by Brexit. Liberals and Blairites denied they were accountable to the people; Conservative Brexiteers flogged the dead horse of Thatcherism, a doctrine which very few voters support and is in any case inherently hostile to sovereignty; socialists offered the people everything except what they actually voted for—greater control of the state. In the end Boris Johnson, was forced by the Brexit Party to ‘Get Brexit done’. He put together a vaguely Red Tory/Blue Labour programme. Do you remember levelling up? But it came to nothing.
The old parties are dead. And the authority of the state is withering away with them, because these are the parties through which we once represented ourselves as a singular people, a nation.
Fourth point: If we were to stop there—calling out the old parties and political traditions for the zombies they are—we would be overlooking the most important question. And we would be letting ourselves off the hook.
The key question is this: why when the referendum happened, and when Brexit happened, and when it was followed immediately by lockdown was there no independent political alternative?
Neither during the referendum campaign nor in the battle over Brexit was there any organised political party, tendency or movement really able to articulate the voters’ challenge into a politics that could actually represent the sovereignty of the people and strengthen that sovereignty through the process of Brexit. There was no alternative to both Remain’s Project Fear and Leave’s failed Thatcherite Euroscepticism.
Why was there no movement that had independent politics able not simply to defend the principle of democracy, but to advance the project of a new democratic state to be built from the ruins of the old one?
It’s a particularly pertinent question for us in this room because I suspect that many of us felt politically homeless well before 2016.
And that failure really is on us…here in this building. And I include myself and Philip in that. It is on us because before 2016 we already had access to most of the intellectual building blocks of an independent politics of national sovereignty.
We had James Heartfield’s breakthrough work on the European Union as the expression of internal political decay. We also had Chris Bickerton’s development of Heartfield’s insight in his magisterial theory of state transformation in the European Union. We had Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void with its compelling formulation of the political decay of the state. We had Politics Without Sovereignty, written among others by Philip, here, James Heartfield, Chris Bickerton, and Tara McCormack; and my own work on the internal decay of the UK’s sovereignty as revealed in its criminal law. Work on the last two publications had also introduced us to Martin Loughlin’s reconstruction of the classical theory of political sovereignty.
All of these were published years before the referendum. But even when we knew the referendum was coming, we did not start putting these ideas together into an independent politics of national sovereignty. As a result, we had little influence on the outcome and, more especially, on what has happened since. The cosmopolitan uniparty was left in place, presiding over the swamp of the living dead that is Westminster today.
Fifth and last point: whatever reasons we may have had before 2016 for not trying to develop an independent politics, we don’t have those excuses anymore.
There are now many thousands of citizens out there who know our democracy is failing, and don’t like it; but they cannot find a national politics that represents them. The voters have clearly identified for us the political idea around which an independent democratic politics can be organised: national sovereignty. And in Taking Control we have put the concepts we had before 2016 together with the experience of Brexit to begin to articulate the independent politics of national sovereignty that we were missing during and after the referendum.
The experience of Brexit demonstrates to us that taking control of our politics poses the challenge of nation-building: not in Africa or Central Asia, but right here at home. If we don’t get on with building a new nation here in Britain right now, we will go on missing the new political opportunities that are arising all the time, just like we fumbled the one that Brexit presented to us. And our democracy will continue to decay around us.
Philip Cunliffe:
Democracy requires sovereignty, and sovereignty can only be national.
In order that we can be sure that the public will is enacted, we need a single, authoritative centre of collective decision-making free from any external oversight or authority, not only to ensure that the public can observe their will in action, but also so that they can hold power to account – this is the sovereign state.
For ordinary citizens, sovereignty is what makes politics matter – knowing that the states have the power, right and capacity to act on the will of the majority. The sovereign state in turn requires a national form – for state power to be contained and limited, we need to be clear about how far the sovereign’s authority extends, and this means that the sovereign needs to be bound to a particular, limited territory and population: the nation. If we are to have sovereignty and democracy, we need a nation.
What Brexit proved is that the old nation-state is long gone. The very fact that Brexit was so tortuous, so difficult, its gains so fragile, showed that there was no nation to emerge resurgent from under the rubble of member-statehood. This is no surprise, as it was precisely the decline and decay of the old nation-state that gave rise to Britain’s member-statehood in the first place. So there is no going ‘back’ to the nation. There is nothing to go back to, we can only go forward.
If we are to have new nations, then we need to nation-build – we need to reform our actually existing society not as a backward-looking community centred around inherited cultural values, but as a political association aspiring to collective self-government.
It’s important to grasp that nation-building cannot be understood in the terms of familiar debates about history curricula in schools, or university reading lists or what the BBC did or didn’t do. The noisy and regressive culture war about the past, about the achievements and the crimes of the old, departed Britain, will continue to dominate for as long as there is no political effort to build a new nation. Culture war is an evasion of the political task of nation-building because it is primarily a question of rebuilding political representation: a new nation can only be built in a dialectic between state and society. It means filling the void between rulers and ruled with new mediating links.
In Taking Control we make a range of proposals for how we have to take control and build a democratic Britain. I want to focus on a few of them here, those that concern rebuilding political representation and strengthening the union.
First, on political representation, we propose to establish popular sovereignty through strengthening Britain’s most democratic institution: the sovereignty of parliament. And this requires democratic reforms, so that unlike the current parties, we have political representatives who take parliamentary sovereignty seriously. To do this we must:
- End the corporate financing of political parties and cap individual donations. The book contains more specific details of these proposals – with the aim of making parties more responsive to individual citizens, and force them to seek out citizen support, build active and larger memberships, and generate ideas that will earn them the loyalty of citizens.
- Permit the recall of MPs on political grounds – again this is to ensure greater responsiveness to citizens and ensure parliamentarians conform to their electoral mandate, and to enshrine the voters as the judges of that mandate.
- Adopt proportional representation for the election of MPs – we propose this not on the grounds that PR is always and everywhere better than First-Past-the-Post, but rather as a battering ram to enable the public to break through the existing party system, clearing the way to allow new parties to form and thereby give the public more voice. In a context in which the majority of the British public no longer feel represented by the major parties, PR will allow citizens to express their political views more effectively. Our first two proposals, reforming party finance and enabling political recall of MPs, will also radically limit a downside of PR, the capacity of party leaderships to cook up deals with other parties after the election and betray their manifesto promises to the electorate.
- Abolish the House of Lords, and institutionalise unicameral politics. To clarify, this is not primarily to end the lingering feudal elements of British politics, obnoxious as those elements are, but rather to reverse the slide to technocratic rule. The very existence of the Lords fosters technocratic rule, by separating the detailed scrutiny of legislation, which has in practice been handed over to the Lords, from the grasp of the voters, allowing elected representatives in the Commons to evade their political responsibilities. It separates detailed policy and legislative work from the sphere of electoral accountability – a key feature of member-statehood. It has no place in a new democratic nation-state.
- Increase the size of the House of Commons – so that we have one MP for every 50,000 electors. This would not only once again give the public greater voice, it would also significantly increase the capacity of the House to scrutinise legislation, and overwhelm the power of all the independent regulatory agencies and state bureaucrats who have thrived under the years of member-statehood.
In addition to revitalising representative politics in Britain we need urgently to consolidate the union of England, Wales and Scotland from which it is formed.
Perhaps the most significant gain of Brexit for the work of nation-building in Britain has been the way that it has fatally undermined the cause of Scottish secession and the SNP. Radically improving political representation in Britain as a whole, and coming up with a better system of local government, would allow us to go further and convince Scottish and Welsh voters to abandon Tony Blair’s disastrous fragmentation of the nation through devolution.
On the other hand, the most glaring failure of Brexit is the Northern Ireland Protocol. It is the most concrete manifestation of the weakness of UK sovereignty after Brexit. It not only imposes a wholly undemocratic regime of economic regulation on Northern Ireland but radically limits the UK’s capacity to diverge from Single Market regulation if the Union is to be preserved. Building a new British nation means grasping this nettle. The Protocol reveals the Union with Northern Ireland to be the UK’s Achilles heel. We need to convince Northern Ireland’s voters to reunify their island. If we do that, we can take a major step to realising the sovereignty of both the British and the Irish peoples.
Our proposals are not exhaustive of what is needed for democratic renewal. But the promise of Brexit – of collective self-government – will not be realised without the effort to fill the void and make political representation meaningful, the effort to build a new nation.
5th November 2023
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