The biggest Brexit donor was the stockbroker Peter Hargreaves. He gave £3.2m to the leave campaign. He justified his enthusiasm as follows: “We will get out there and we will become incredibly successful because we will be insecure again. And insecurity is fantastic.” If you are wondering, “Fantastic for whom?”, the current television ad for the company he co-founded, Hargreaves Lansdown, could supply an answer. It presents itself as a safe haven in times of disruptive change. Among the examples it provides? Brexit.
Perhaps our most poignant political folk tale is the notion of accountability. Those who hurt and undermine us will be punished, while those who help us will be rewarded. In reality, little in either business or politics could be further from the truth. A more reliable rule is that those who generate insecurity profit from it.
In early 1915, a newspaper owner called Benito Mussolini fomented riots in favour of joining the first world war, and threatened revolution if the government refused: Italy’s neutrality, he claimed, brought shame on the nation. Few warmongers were as vocal or visible. Disastrously unprepared and ill-equipped, Italy joined the war in May. The resultant sense of national humiliation and loss – the “mutilated victory” – provided an opening for the fascists … led by Benito Mussolini.
In spring 1940, chaotic planning and extreme indecision by Britain’s first lord of the admiralty caused disaster in Norway, when the Allies could not prevent an invasion by Nazi Germany. The failure of the military campaign triggered the resignation of the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. He was replaced by … the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill. It might have been the right decision, but it was achieved by peculiar means.
Though the current sense of national decline in the United Kingdom has many parents, few carry more blame for our reduced and chaotic state than Nigel Farage. He was to the decision to leave the EU what Mussolini was to the decision to join the first world war. Like that other slightly rightwing figure, he promised miracles with a policy that instead delivered misery and retreat.
Has he been punished by the electorate? Not a bit of it. Austerity enabled Brexit, as popular fury caused by a sense of decline and loss encouraged people to aim a massive kick at the system. Austerity plus Brexit enabled the rise of Farage’s Reform UK. Further decline and insecurity are a boon for those who can channel our rage towards scapegoats: immigrants, asylum seekers, Muslims, woke “elites”. If Farage becomes prime minister in 2029, his Brexit disaster will be a major reason why.
The harsh truth, as Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue in their book Democracy for Realists, is that we possess almost no capacity for attribution. The theory of “retrospective voting” – the idea that we judge candidates on their records and vote accordingly – is a fairytale. While we might vote on the basis of changes in our wellbeing, we “consistently and systematically punish incumbents for conditions beyond their control”. Achen and Bartels estimate that 2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet. Among the states where weather appears to have been decisive was Florida, on whose count the election turned. In view of the contrast between the climate policies of Al Gore and George W Bush, who won the presidency, that was quite ironic.
I fear that Farage will succeed in shrugging off the undeclared £5m he was given by a crypto billionaire just before he decided to stand for election in 2024. Nor will people punish his party in a general election for what will almost certainly be its dismal failures in local government. It’s not that voters don’t care. We have a powerful sense of justice, and political cynicism and anger are driven by the idea that “they always get away with it”, even if it’s poorly defined who “they” are. The problem is that, busy with our lives, our attention yanked from one crisis to another, we don’t have the mental space to keep receipts.
One result is that the more crises we face, the less accountable politics becomes. Boris Johnson sometimes appeared to trigger new crises to distract people from the old ones. Donald Trump seems to do the same. And the more dysfunctional and turbulent life becomes, the more he can claim to be the nation’s saviour and redeemer. It’s like pushing someone into a pond to enact a dramatic rescue.
Our entire political system is premised on the idea of accountability. Brilliant theory: just a shame it bears no relation to reality. Those who believe the fairytale tend to lose elections. The winning formula is not listing your achievements and explaining what a schmuck the other person is. It is demonstrating hope. You flatter your existing voters while attracting new ones by telling a powerful story of transformation. If you’re already in government, you should spend big on public services: demonstrating in deed as well as word that life is improving.
In other words, you do the exact opposite of what the UK’s government does. With its self-defeating fiscal rules, which suppress the “growth” Labour claims to prioritise and damage the perception of wellbeing on which success depends, it reinforces our sense of hopelessness and decline. The current leadership certainly flatters a political base, just not its own. Instead, it appeals to what it calls “hero voters”: people it thinks it can lure away from the right. In reality, such voters are almost entirely mythical. By sacrificing itself to these wraiths, Labour alienates its own base.
It reinforces this alienation with its deliberate policy of “hippy punching”: demonstrating its macho, pro-capital credentials by ripping down environmental protections, banning protests, cutting benefits and launching performative attacks on immigrants. There’s a basic rule in politics and in life: hate people and they will hate you back.
The animating force of Starmer’s team is its extreme and irrational hostility to the Labour left, a hostility it brought into government as a national programme. Instead of inspiring, igniting, delighting, it points to Farage’s record and threatens that if we don’t vote Labour, we’ll get what’s coming to us.
In other words, it subscribes to a mythic conception of politics, a belief system that describes a planet other than our own. When Starmer goes – and after two wasted years, he must – we should hope his replacement has some idea of how this business works.
