Gradually, then suddenly

The death throes of a regime

For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.

-Stefan Zweig

Now, as Antonio Gramsci might have put it, is the time of monsters. Our wassail is over; the Graces, my friend, have abandoned the earth; there below, the Greek ships wait. In short - Britain’s ruling regime is kaput. The only thing left to do is to wait and see how the decline plays out and plan as positively as possible for the aftermath.

There is nothing particularly controversial about me saying this. It is rapidly turning into the consensus view. As I put it a few months ago, you just have to live here. But on Tuesday this week the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, circulated a so-called ‘Cabinet read-out’ to journalists which nicely summarised both the nature of the problem and the cause of the coming cataclysm.

The immediate trigger for Rayner’s comments was the springing up of a series of demonstrations that are currently threatening to transmogrify into a gilets jaunes style mass movement. This concerns the use of ‘asylum’ hotels to house illegal migrants, mostly young men - a practice which I have written about before, and which is spreading to very unlikely areas of what you might call ‘L’angleterre profonde’: sleepy, prosperous and very English places like Epping and Diss. The tactic of slandering these protests as the work of the ‘far right’ has been deployed by the usual suspects (the Socialist Worker has even described them as ‘pogroms’) but the label isn’t sticking: the truth of the matter is that the population are increasingly simply sick of being governed in the indefensible way we are. We all know that this is the source of the frustration, and feel it keenly. The forced imposition of large numbers of deracinated and often sexually aggressive young men from foreign climes on relatively small and settled communities is simply the most visible aspect of the basically contemptuous and high-handed operating modality of our, decaying and flatulent, ruling regime. And the kick-back is not ‘far right’ - it is rather to be understood as the reaction of the population to a governing apparatus that does not understand, and cannot fulfil, the most elementary task of the sovereign.

Rayner’s comments speak to this issue directly (although, of course, she does not grasp this). Here is how they were reported by Huffington Post:

[Rayner] told her cabinet colleagues that ‘economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services, technological change and the amount of time people were spending alone online, and declining trust in institutions are having a profound impact on society’.

The deputy PM also pointed out that 17 of the 18 areas where there was a high rate of disorder last summer were among the most deprived places in the country.

She told cabinet: ‘While Britain was a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, the government had to show it had a plan to address people’s concerns and provide opportunities for everyone to flourish.’

Rayner pointed to Labour’s upcoming Plan for Neighbourhoods, meant to deliver billions of pounds of investments over a decade to the most deprived areas.

Asked if this meant Rayner saw a connection between high levels of immigration and the disorder, the prime minister’s spokesperson said: ‘She sees a link between concerns people have about where the government is acting on their behalf and on their interests with a range of factors [sic].’

Got that? Britain is a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and the government has to show it has a plan to address people’s concerns and provide opportunies for everyone to flourish. And, er, there is a link between concerns people have about (checks notes) ‘where the government is acting on their behalf and on their interests with a range of factors’.

You have to laugh, even through the tears: these are the people who are in charge. Britain is a successful country? And this government has a…plan? But the important point to emphasise here is that Rayner, and the people around her, are simply constitutionally incapable of recognising the problem itself, or the solution. They actually think that ‘immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services’ is just one of a ‘range of factors’ destabilising society, alongside ‘economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, technological change and the amount of time people were spending alone online, and declining trust in institutions’. And they actually think that the remedy for this is just ‘investment’ in ‘deprived areas’ so as to allow people to ‘flourish’.

British readers are familiar with this mindset: typically what it means is that money gets funnelled into regeneration schemes that kit out otherwise forgotten places like Newport, Dundee or Middlesborough with nice new shopping precincts and art galleries nobody visits. The idea, more or less, is that opposition to uncontrolled immigration is really just a feature of economic insecurity and, perhaps, a lack of civic pride. And if government can therefore just press the ‘grow’ button a bit harder, people will feel better off and pride will re-emerge, and our ‘successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country’ will simply become more successful yet.

What to say to help Angela Rayner out of her unfortunate predicament? Who will break the news to her? At first glance it seems incredible that otherwise purportedly intelligent people could think and say things that are so stupid - that somebody could fail to see that uncontrolled immigration is a phenomenon of vastly different nature to ‘economic security’ or ‘the amount of time people spend alone online’. Yet this failure gets us to the heart of the matter because it brings us to the focal point: the issue that lies at the centre of regime politics in 2025 and the issue that will determine its fate.

Let us take a step back then, for a moment, and examine the current British regime. A regime, to cite Harvey Mansfield, comprises the ‘some’ who govern the ‘many’. Wider than a government or legislature, it really comprises what I once described as ‘anybody who is broadly connected with the exercise of governing - whether in the executive branch itself broadly understood (the civil service, police, etc.), or within the great penumbra of academics, teachers, and other public sector employees who either enforce, replicate, or elaborate’ a set of particular values. This, I continued:

[I]s a conceptual grouping rather than a formal one. Any society is constituted to give effect to certain givens, norms, ideas. And the regime can be thought of, then, as that class of people who benefit from, and enforce, a particular set of constitutive values. (Indeed one could almost go so far as to say that a regime is synonymous with the values which sustain and justify it.) They arrange society in accordance with their preferences. And they present their preferences as not just essential, good, decent and right - but as justifications for their own status. The regime governs on the basis that its values are always necessary to enforce.

Britain has been governed continuously since 1997 by a regime with a relatively focused set of constitutive values that can be understood chiefly as a positive response to globalisation. The end of the Cold War and technological innovation (the incipient internet, cheaper air transport, etc.) combined to generate a fairly rapid shift towards global openness. And this brought into the political mainstream a set of ideas that had been ‘lying around’, to use Milton Friedman’s expression, for some time: free trade, open borders, multiculturalism, and so on. These values had, it is safe to say, already been imbibed by the chattering classes, beginning really in the 1960s, and the elite fairly rapidly embraced them politically when globalisation began in earnest, staring in the very early 1990s.

The result of this was that Britain’s ruling regime became strongly characterised by a set of norms that emerged from the consensus the ‘some’ who ruled the ‘many’ had about the values of a modern society. And we are of course all aware of what those norms are and how they find expression: everybody is not so much equal as interchangable; culture is purely aesthetic in the most superficial sense; borders and distinctions are always bad; commercialisation is always good; openness is the supreme virtue; closedness is the most deadly sin; and so on.

Support for open borders is the lodestar of this regime because it is the intersecting node, as if it were, of all of these different vectors. If you believe that everybody is interchangeable, that culture is purely aesthetic, that borders and distinctions are always bad, that commercialisation is always good, that openness is the supreme virtue, and that closedness is the most deadly sin, then free movement will become the literally quintessential element of your value system - the one that permeates them all and holds them together.

The problem with this, however, is that it has confronted the British regime with a contradiction. This is because in the end political authority cannot rest on the mere idea of openness - at least, not in the long run. Political authority that rests only on openness, and on deliberate repudiation of any connection to a land, or a people, is purely transactional or (to use one of my favourite Foucauldianisms), ‘synthetic’. It can maintain loyalty only by in effect handing out sweeties - or by staving off displeasure in a Hobbesian sense. Anyone in the world may come, and go, but the relationship between individual and State is coldly commercial: contingent on mutual benefit and therefore resting on thin and barren soil.

This can sustain goings-on for a little while if economic conditions are good, but is no proper grounds on which authority can rest, and not just because it makes government hostage to economic fortune (though it does). It is because in the end the nature of sovereignty itself is precisely to form the basis for the territorial unity of a people - that is really what it is for - and, ironically, it is the consequences of the very embracing of globalisation that are causing this to unravel.

I elucidated this in greater detail in a recent paywalled post, but the essence of the matter is really in the description of the sovereign, shared by both Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt, as he who has purview over not just the exception, but also the norm. The sovereign is that power who, through granting himself the sole license to use violence, determines where the metaphorical city wall lies around the polity, and protects it. And in so doing, he also determines what is normal (i.e., what is within the walls) and what is exceptional - who are the friends (those within) and who are the enemies (those to be ejected). Through doing this - through exerting oversight of the border around the polity - he creates the space within which the citizens can engage in politics freely as friends, and thereby indeed makes politics as such possible. And in so doing he both binds together and reflects the underlying normative unity between people and place.

This roots his authority precisely in the territory itself and its relationship to those who live in it. This is what provides it with genuine permanence. And the post-97 British regime, in flagrantly and indeed wholeheartedly abandoning a commitment to the core task of the sovereign through its chaotic immigration policy, is thereby undermining the only claim to possess genuine authority that it could in the long run make. It has transformed the relationship between British government and the people occupying the territory into a transactional and synthetic one; the only plea it can in the end make to the populace is something like, ‘Please let us remain in charge and we’ll provide opportunities for everyone to flourish.’ But this is thin gruel that cannot sustain a polity across time, and we are now seeing the inevitable consequences play out.

How do we explain, then, what happens next? In Chapter XXIX of Leviathan, Hobbes lays out a list of things that ‘weaken, or tend to the dissolution of a commonwealth’. And at the top of the list, aptly (if a little surprisingly), is the voluntary weakness of the ruler - the fact that he has become ‘content with less power, than to the peace, and defence of the commonwealth is necessarily required’.

This would seem a suitable way to describe our crop of current leaders, who have managed to convince themselves that all of our problems would go away with a bit of ‘investment’ in ‘deprived areas’, and who are completely unwilling to exercise the ruthlessness and psychological toughness required to do what is necessary to secure Britain’s borders. The perception that people appear to be able to freely come and go from the UK whether legally or otherwise, and that the State will even facilitate them doing so illegally by putting them up in hotel rooms, is not just one problem among a ‘range of factors’. It goes to the heart of what sovereignty is all about because it casts government as being incapable of delineating the inside from the outside, norm from exception, friend from enemy. And it is therefore now condition critical, code red, squeaky-bum time for the survival of the regime - yet those in charge are absolutely incapable of even recognising this to be the case, let alone doing anything about it. This means it will, fairly rapidly, arrive at a point of system failure.

The consequences of this will be ugly. Something bad is going to happen. One can almost smell it. The regime that has governed Britain since 1997 is coming to an ignominous end. With its end there is likely to come a considerable amount of pain. It is extremely unlikely that the current government will survive until 2029, the point at which the next general election will nominally have to take place. Sir Keir Starmer already stinks of crisis, and the stench that clings to him will get worse until it becomes intolerable. What happens when he is replaced is anyone’s guess. But things will simply not get better until sane immigration policy, craved by all citizens of whatever racial background, is restored and implemented with the necessary rigour - because that is in the end what is absolutely fundamental in grounding the authority of the sovereign.

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