Death Warmed Up

Peter Ramsay argues that the British right’s proposal for a Great Repeal Act only reveals the futility of its approach to the nation.

An online Anglofuturist put out a video last week weaving together the words of the Tory politician Robert Jenrick, ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe and conservative historian David Starkey, each promoting the proposal for a Great Repeal Act, over some stirring patriotic music. The idea has some superficial attraction, but what the video actually provides is a handy summary of the dead end that the Thatcherite British right has reached. 

The proposal is to go through all the legislation accumulated over recent decades and repeal anything that takes away power and responsibility from parliament. The Human Rights Act and Britain’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights are the headline targets, but equality legislation and quangos like the Sentencing Council or the Office for Budget Responsibility appear to be in the frame too.  For Lowe the idea is to restore ‘the primacy of parliament’ in the operations of the state. 

There is something to be said for the general proposition. Lowe, Jenrick and Starkey are right that much of this legislation will have to go if government in Britain is to become democratically accountable to the British people. And their invocation of liberty is attractive too. Much of what needs to be repealed restricts civil liberties that are a necessary condition of self-rule and accountable government. Moreover, the idea of Lowe’s ‘Great Repeal Act’ or, better, Jenrick’s ‘Great Reform Act’, could be an effective political packaging of such a reconstitution of the state. But the underlying political motivation of the proposed reform reveals the utter exhaustion and essential irrelevance of the Thatcherite British right. All that this tendency now serves to do is to discredit some of the very changes that are needed in Britain.

The core proposition that parliament should be supreme is unquestionably correct. The great strength of the British constitution is that the House of Commons is, as Rupert Lowe says, ‘the elected assembly wielding sovereign power’, and that in wielding this sovereign power the Commons is ‘accountable only to the electorate’. However, the critical flaw in his argument is that he thinks that his Great Repeal Act will be ‘followed by national restoration.’ He thinks that once power is restored to parliament the old nation that Britain once was can also be restored. And Jenrick agrees: ‘I am for finishing the job we started with Brexit, and restoring to our people and our parliament its sovereignty….defending our own freedoms and liberties.’ But Lowe and Jenrick are in fact merely repeating the error that Tory and Faragist Eurosceptics made about Brexit. There is no British nation to be restored. Our real problem is how to build a nation anew from the fragments left by the demise of the old.  Brexit was only a necessary condition for embarking on that project.

The Thatcherite Brexiteers thought that all that was needed to restore Britain’s national sovereignty was for parliament to repeal the European Communities Act 1972 and leave the European Union. But Brexit was immediately followed by the globalist policies of lockdown, mass immigration and proxy war against Russia, all pursued by the very Tory prime minister who ‘got Brexit done’. Leaving the European Union could not restore the British nation. That is because the British nation has faded away as a reality. It remains only as a nostalgic dream of the senescent right and the nightmarish hallucination of an equally demented left. In the face of that experience, so-called conservatives and populists persist in the delusion that if we just repeal some bad recent legislation we can restore something that has passed away. What they are proposing is not conservative but atavistic – attempting to force back long-lost traits in a totally different context.

The futility of this atavism is immediately apparent in the video itself. Having praised the elected chamber of parliament, Lowe goes on to explain the other strengths of the old parliamentary constitution: ‘with the monarch as the titular head and the Lords providing continuity and guidance. This formula served us well until 1997.’

There are two connected Thatcherite fantasies here. The first is that the monarchy and House of Lords might serve this function again when the nation is ‘restored’. 

The future of the monarchy is at best uncertain. For the whole of the twentieth century monarchs kept out of British politics and played their purely titular role. However, our current monarch has not always kept his political views to himself, and those views look likely to favour Britain’s failing liberal cosmopolitan status quo in the face of continuing restiveness from below. This will have serious potential consequences for the monarchy’s popular legitimacy.  

If the idea of the hereditary titular head of state is in doubt, the proposition that the House of Lords offers a continuity we could return to is plainly absurd. On the one hand, the hereditary aristocracy that once had at least some claim to offer historical continuity is gone as a distinct political force. There would simply be no continuity in bringing them back, were that even possible or desirable. On the other hand, the existing House of Lords is stuffed with former politicians and the political and business cronies of former prime ministers. They could indeed provide continuity: exactly the continuity we don’t need if we are in the business of reconstituting the state and creating a national political life. 

The House of Lords is an obvious obstacle for anyone who is serious about restoring the political authority of parliament. The idea that this corrupt institution can provide any continuity for the British nation is simply not serious. Even if the monarchy survives the turmoil to come, the wider constitutional context in which it and the House of Lords provided stability has passed into history.

The second Thatcherite fantasy is that Lowe blames Tony Blair for what has gone wrong: ‘This formula served us well until 1997.’ It is of course true that much of the disastrous legislation that has institutionalised the weakness of parliament was New Labour’s work. But what Lowe overlooks is that it was Margaret Thatcher who actually killed the old British nation. Blair just conducted the funeral and buried the corpse. 

Thatcher destroyed the postwar settlement between capital and labour. But it was this settlement that had provided parliament with its real authority through the two-party system, and in so doing constituted the nation as a real living entity. The contributions of the two great classes that made up the nation were politically recognised and represented in the state; and the representation of the people as a whole was made meaningful because it was through this political process, focused in parliament, that the terms of the national settlement were disputed and negotiated. The triumph of Thatcher’s ‘There is no alternative’ to the market sucked the life out of national politics and out of parliament. Thatcher herself regarded New Labour as her greatest achievement. As the interests of organised labour ceased to be represented in politics, parliament was deprived of the ideological dispute that infused the contest of the parties with political content. Government instead appeared as a question of technical competence for experts: the EU, quangoisation and the Human Rights Act were the consequence. 

Though she waved the Union flag furiously, and loudly promoted the fight against the Argies and the IRA alike, Thatcher was unable to revive the nineteenth-century Britain of thrusting entrepreneurialism, free trade and ‘Victorian values’ that she thought would return once she had killed off the postwar order. Thatcher’s domestic policies of deregulation and privatisation set in motion the literal selling off of the nation’s assets and infrastructure to foreign capitalists and governments, something her disciples used to boast about. Her approach was supposed to reignite British enterprise, but it was foreigners who benefited as productive investment and real wages stagnated, and Britain deindustrialised. The result is our low-wage service economy with falling birth rates and a mobile cosmopolitan elite with little skin in the national game. This globalised economy has now sucked in millions of migrants who can have no loyalty or attachment to national institutions and traditions that no longer have any real living influence in the state.

Despite this, Lowe makes it abundantly clear that what he really means by his Great Repeal is more of the Thatcherism that led us here. He directly links the idea of a government that puts the British people first to market libertarianism: ‘Damaging legislation must be repealed. The size of the state drastically reduced….We need a government that will put us first. Protect our interests and get the hell out of our way.’ 

In other words, Lowe wants to restore parliament’s authority precisely in order not to use that authority to build the nation that we need. Our political impasse consists precisely in the fact that against our authoritarian elites, the nation only has for its spokesmen these proponents of the zombified politics that is ultimately responsible for the cosmopolitan dystopia that is today’s Yookay. Lowe was recently expelled from Reform but that was a manufactured dispute required to maintain Nigel Farage’s personality cult. Farage has nothing essentially different to offer. As a consequence of the dead end reached by the old Eurosceptic Thatcherites, and in the face of uncontrolled mass immigration and national disintegration, dissent on the right is slowly turning to ethnonationalism. Any takers for Beirut-on-Thames?

If we are to avoid the civil strife and state failure that is in prospect, then we certainly need to reform our constitution. Lowe, Jenrick and Starkey are correct that at its centre must be the sovereignty of parliament, a constitutional doctrine that is the world-historical achievement of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, and still survives as one of the few elements of real living continuity in our political constitution. If Brexit was not enough in itself to restore our sovereignty as a nation, it did at least preserve this powerful instrument through which we can build a new one.

However, if we are serious about building a nation in Britain rather than fantasising about digging up the corpse of the old one, we first have to recognise the depth of the problem. Neither Lowe’s small-state fantasies nor twittering about Magna Carta are adequate to the task. Neither should we replace that pretence with an alternative atavistic nostalgia for the postwar national order of the old welfare state. That won’t spring back either in the event of constitutional reform, because the forces that made that nation are gone too. Thatcher was only able to destroy the postwar nation because it was unable to resolve the severe crisis it suffered in the 1970s. 

In the video, Starkey praises the work of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an event that has long been discreetly downplayed in popular British history. Starkey is correct that it helped to unleash the revolutionary dynamic of aggressive British mercantile expansion onto the world. It also established the parliamentary sovereignty that provided the constitutional basis for the later development of capitalism and of democracy at home. The Glorious Revolution was itself a coup d’etat against the Catholic king James II; a coup that lacked constitutional legitimacy, and was backed by Dutch money and a Dutch army. The critical lesson to learn from it, however, is that the Whigs and Tories who comprised the English elite, and were in many ways divided among themselves, nevertheless established a clear sense of their collective interests, articulated ideologically around a shared Protestantism and fear of Catholic rule that they thought would bring absolutist government. This idea was sufficiently clear that they were confident enough to draft in foreigners to do their dirty work for them.    

Today our situation is in some respects the reverse of 1688. The most powerful parts of the British elite are in hoc to the interests of foreign capital. One way or another, the Uniparty that rules knows that it has to suppress the inchoate national claims that come from the people below. Intergovernmentalism and intersectionalism are one way; free market dogmatism and Thatcherite nostalgia is another. Rather than revolution or a coup d’etat, with assistance from the outside or clinging to Donald Trump’s coat-tails, the problem of building the nation anew is one of how we lay hands on the democratic core of our existing constitution and turn it to that end. This requires something that the revolutionaries of 1688 had but we do not: a sufficiently vivid sense of (what would later come to be called) the national interest. 

Of course, it is not immediately obvious what our national interest might be, but that is the political value of the concept. It is through the argument over what the national interest amounts to, and the best way to pursue it, that we orient politics to the problem of maintaining our unity as a people living within our particular borders and under a shared sovereign authority. We therefore need competing political programmes articulated in terms of the British national interest. The old parties are being forced by Trump 2.0 to begin to think in these terms but, after decades of human rights and free markets, climate justice and forever war, lockdown and Global Britain, they plainly cannot be trusted with our national interest. We need new parties that are both serious about the problem and able to get into parliament; parties that are not just another set of Thatcherite zombies.

The Great Reform Act we need, therefore, is one that the electorate can get behind because it will repeal the restrictions on civil liberty, but also eliminate the corrupt House of Lords and recreate the House of Commons as a legislative chamber under real pressure from the electorate to use its sovereign power. That would be a parliament that could use our sovereignty as a people to mobilise us as citizens to the most urgent tasks of ensuring political and civil liberty, ending ethnic and religious division, ending foreign military adventures, consolidating and defending our borders, increasing productivity, investing in our energy, transport, food and water infrastructure, and building some bloody houses. This is the minimum commitment we need if we are to revive not the bureaucratic power of the state but its political authority. And in the process build a British nation.