If You Liked Neoliberalism, You’ll Love Nativism

I have finally got around to having a look at the Hansard Society survey that came out a few weeks ago. The audit caused something of a stir because it concluded that the public were sick of parliamentary democracy and wanted an authoritarian strongman to take over. As the Guardian reported:

The UK public is increasingly disenchanted with MPs and government and ever more willing to welcome the idea of authoritarian leaders who would ignore parliament, a long-running survey of attitudes to politics has shown.

Amid the Brexit chaos, overall public faith in the political system has reached a nadir not previously seen in the 16-year history of the Hansard Society’s audit of political engagement, lower even than at the depths of the crisis over MPs’ expenses.

Almost three-quarters of those asked said the system of governance needed significant improvement, and other attitudes emerged that ‘challenge core tenets of our democracy’, the audit’s authors stated.

The study, compiled annually by the democracy charity, found that when people were asked whether ‘Britain needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules’, 54% agreed and only 23% said no.

The report itself isn’t as striking as the Guardian makes out. There are key phrases that jump out at you – ‘People are pessimistic about the country’s problems and their possible solution, with sizeable numbers willing to entertain radical political changes’, ‘42% think it would be better if the government didn’t have to worry so much about parliamentary votes when tackling the country’s problems’ – but Hansard doesn’t seem to drill down as much as I’d like. I would like to have seen quotes from participants in their own words. What kind of radical changes? How has the country declined compared to say thirty years ago? The report does not say. It’s all a bit vague.

I am reminded of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. Hochschild is a Berkeley sociologist, the epitome of American liberalism. In 1964 she took part in the freedom rides where students travelled to Mississippi to help black southerners register to vote. Her book is about the time she spent with working class voters in rural Louisiana. Many were disillusioned with politics as usual and most planned to vote Trump in the 2016 election. Some of Hochschild’s subjects were enthusiastic, others viewed Trump as a lesser of two evils. The main sentiment in Lake Charles was anti government. Taxes were too high. The state should get off our backs. The Louisianans worked hard and lived in very close communities. If you lost your job or fell ill, it was okay to claim unemployment for a while; otherwise, your family and the local church would help out.

Hochschild asked a small businessman named Mike Schaff: ‘What has the federal government done that you feel grateful for?’

‘Hurricane relief.’ He pauses again.

‘The I-10…’ (a federally funded freeway). Another long pause.

‘Okay, unemployment insurance.’ He had once been briefly on it.

I suggest the Food and Drug Administration inspectors who check the safety of our food.

‘Yeah, that too.’

‘What about the post office that delivered the parts of that Zenith 701 you assembled and flew over Bayou Corn Sinkhole to take a video you put on YouTube?’

‘That came through FedEx.’

Hochschild’s book is a testament to the beautiful state of Louisiana and the warmth and kindness of its people. (It’s a quirk of human nature that small-town conservatives often display more compassion and solidarity than virtue signalling liberals.) Much of the story is animated by the various big corporate pollution scandals in local rivers and bayous. Debates rage over kitchen tables over how to clean the lakes. Strangers in Their Own Land is a masterwork of imaginative empathy, by someone who respects people enough to challenge them, and pick at their contradictions.

But my point really is that this kind of self sufficient libertarianism doesn’t exist in this country. Hansard’s focus groups likely had similar complaints to Mike Schaff, Sharon Galicia, Danny McCorquodale and Hochschild’s other friends in Lake Charles. But the British don’t want ‘government off their backs’. They voted for Brexit because they thought there would be more money for the NHS. Tories learned to win elections again through giveaways like Help to Buy. Britons tend to demand state-based solutions, and that raises the stakes so much higher.

My parents’ generation came of age in the postwar settlement when it was agreed that the state would provide. They had the NHS, a generous welfare system, free college education, a raft of entitlements and privileges. I do not envy them and I’m sure they struggled. My generation has more personal liberty and technological advances. British sociology from then to now has essentially been about people adapting from a welfare state communitarian society to a more neoliberal society with free information and entertainment.

It’s something I first noticed in the early 2010s when austerity hit. People had grown up with the assumption that the state will look after them and they find out the hard way that it doesn’t. The public want more council houses, more mortgage subsidies, more GP appointments, more roadworks, more post offices, more childcare, more benefits, more hospitals, more schools, more border guards, more cops, more jails. After all, the authoritarian strongman, the Trumps, the Putins, the Orbáns, they are nothing without the state apparatus of soldiers, police, spies and lawyers in stretching battalions behind them. And yes, these kind of demands tend to come from Britons of a certain age, too young for the war but old enough for the peace dividend (although again, the Hansard Society is maddeningly vague on this).

But there is a danger in wishing more powers for the state. We don’t really get this in the UK because we never lived under a dictatorship. We never lived in the godforsaken parts of twentieth century Europe where you had to bribe three separate border authorities to get a day pass to leave your village. The idea of losing the right to live and work in 27 countries didn’t impact on the Brexit debate. It didn’t feel like a loss.

That’s why people are casual about the idea of expanding state powers. Another frequent demand I noticed in the austerity years was that the state should crack down on one particular group, or take entitlements from another particular group. We are too casual about letting the state intervene in other people’s lives, and like I say, it raises the stakes. It could be that this is the end of the neoliberal age and my generation are going to find out what authoritarianism is. Housing benefit, predator drones – they come from the same place.

Research pollster Matthew Goodwin says all this is alarmist. He writes: ‘When prominent Remainers compare Eurosceptics to Nazis, or modern-day Britain to the Weimar Republic, they are engaging in something that has defined much of our post-referendum debate: liberal ‘catastrophising’ – a cognitive distortion leading them to expect, and become obsessed by, the worst of all possible outcomes.’ I hope he is right – but it’s no comfort to say that we’re not headed to a contemporary Third Reich. A variant on Erdoğan’s Turkey or Law and Justice Poland would be grim enough. A country doesn’t have to go too far into fascism to shatter lives, or make changes that can’t be taken back.

I think politicians and activists of all kinds should be very careful what they wish for.

A Fugitive Canvas

We think of the Weimar Republic as the calm before the storm. Its histories are near drowned out by an ominous descending note in the reader’s imagination. Clare Clark’s stunning novel reminds us that the Republic had a great autonomous life of its own – and that things did not have to go the way they went.

Clark’s acknowledgements testify to the thoroughness of her scholarship, but she avoids the obvious trap for the historical novelist, that of throwing her research around. She wears her learning lightly, and as a result her setting is recognisably Berlin, the city of Victor Klemperer and Alfred Döblin, not to mention Bernie Gunther. It is arts and cabaret and tenements and noise and life, a city where the National Socialist movement is just one of many political annoyances Berliners shrug off from the day to day. On the beach one summer young artist Emmeline is propositioned by a group of young thugs, who call her a ‘dirty little Jewess’. Emmeline insults them back in both German and Russian. It’s a fine scene but also the only point at which Clark’s world feels artificial in the knowing historian’s sense. It feels too much like a foreboding.

The plot itself involves a complex art fraud involving fake van Goghs. We begin with the elderly art critic, Julius Köhler-Schultz, embroiled in a bitter divorce from a much younger woman. (Clark handles the dying echoes of their relationship with deft irony: Julius tells us in narration that his ex Luisa is a mindless dilettante but her voice that cuts into his thoughts is always bright and perceptive.) A young man named Matthias Rachmann seeks him out for advice on his fledgling career as an art dealer. Matthias has a Russian friend who smuggles numerous great works out of post-revolution Moscow. The novice is flattering and deferential, and soon Julius trusts him more than any living soul. Later, the young man is convicted of selling forged paintings and his disgrace threatens to ruin Berlin’s galleries, its valuation experts, anyone who was ever gulled by Rachmann’s ingenue charm.

Who cares when most of these paintings will end up on the pyres of degenerate art anyway? But Clark’s strong narrative carries you along, the pull and tug of a complex story well told, and you don’t have to know anything about art (I certainly don’t) to be absorbed in her world. (Emmeline’s chapters have some marvellous vignettes on arts in advertising and commerce.) But it is the final sequence, the diaries of Frank Berszacki, that really resonate. By this point it is 1933 and the net is tightening. Frank is a burned out lawyer, who defended Rachmann unsuccessfully. As a Jew he is vulnerable, and his passages are full of disappearances and deportations and insults and abuse.

Mourning a lost country and a lost child, Frank’s diaries are deeply sad. Yet they are also inspiring as Clark captures the forbearance and dignity in Frank’s love for his wife and their determination to keep their family together whatever the odds. You finish In The Full Light of the Sun with the sense that there will be another morning someday.

The Drama of Reassurance

I never got into Line of Duty. It’s generally on in our house and I did try at some point to watch series two in sequence but it just didn’t take. Sure, I love the BBC, but it’s rare I can enjoy its dramas. Their last great show was Happy Valley, a hardboiled crime series set in Calderdale. It ran for two seasons before the execs, presumably realising that a frisky beast had escaped the killing-pen, cancelled it for good. Since then I’ve not been able to watch flagship BBC drama.

Long before Line of Duty Jed Mercurio wrote a novel called Bodies, about a junior hospital doctor. The doctor begins with good intentions but soon becomes burned out and disillusioned with the sclerotic and unaccountable hospital trust. Eventually the doctor is himself investigated for negligence and, on suspension, he watches TV at his parents’ house:

Our public services are failing while television plays hour after hour of incorruptible policemen catching criminals, of crusading lawyers keeping the innocent out of prison, of streetwise social workers rescuing children from abuse, of heroic doctors sticking needles in tension pneumos… I’m flicking between the real world and the drama of reassurance and I feel like I’m the only person watching who recognises the mendacity, sees it clear enough to want to kick in the TV screen.

Line of Duty is about police corruption, but to me it seems also a drama of reassurance. It is an Aaron Sorkin show transferred to London – a world of impeccable people saying the right things in firm RP accents, a world of pristine uniforms and tidy, unhurried offices, of gleaming official cars and hushed corridors and an authority that listens. It is television that takes itself very very seriously. And it communicates, I think, a love of power and process.

While Line of Duty is sort of believable, Mercurio absolutely let his imagination run away from him in his stand alone series Bodyguard. Richard Madden plays a ex-soldier straight out of the metropolitan cliched image of what ex soldiers are like. He is assigned to protect Keeley Hawes, playing a Home Secretary whose policies Madden despises. Naturally, the gruff ex-squaddie and the high-class politician become lovers, before Mercurio has her character killed, and sends Madden off on a mercy mission to capture Hawes’s Deep State killers. Bitch, please. 

Clearly I’m in a minority in my views. Everyone else I know is obsessed with Line of Duty, it’s all over my social media, spilling into the news pages, and there is even a Line of Duty podcast. (What can they find to talk about?) I am the Line of Duty Grinch. But still, I’m not alone. The fabulous Danuta Kean picked up on the show’s cavalier approach to procedural details:

With the subtlety of a size nine boot, each episode has been riddled with inconsistencies that would never pass muster in a novel. From the fact that women being brutally killed seems to be less of a priority than nailing dodgy DCI Roz Huntley, through to a rookie member of the AC-12 anti-corruption team blithely scribbling his password onto a Post-it note. Or the inability of Huntley’s colleagues to notice her suppurating wound, or that all the CPS needs to prosecute is a copper with a hunch, as happens with hapless Polish cleaner Hana Reznikova.

Novelist Kate London also queried the show’s realism while recognising that its problems run deeper than fidelity to force policies.

I don’t even think that any appearance of reality is important in making us consider bigger questions. It all depends on what kind of story you are telling. In Breaking Bad, Walter White, a former chemistry teacher, runs a million-dollar methamphetamine business in Albuquerque. It’s clearly fiction but somehow the complexity of White – his relationship with his family, his young business partner and with money itself – contains something truthful that convinces us. The challenge seems to be to write a gripping plot that also makes us consider our own lives, societies and beliefs. We know TV can do this.

This is it for me. To vary an old saw, it is not the tale but how you tell it. You can start with a ridiculous premise but you can sell it if you trust the audience and tell them something they might not already know. The converse applies: you can have a very well researched and realistic story but it won’t work if you don’t recognise the intelligence of your audience or do the hard work involved in building your world.

It is a subjective thing of course but for me Line of Duty doesn’t do this so that’s why it doesn’t work. It is to the crime drama what Jeffrey Archer is to the novel.