Britain’s Populist Pivot Is Failing to Fix Its Problems
Trapped within the insular tone of post-Brexit politics, British politics has never been so saturated with populist rhetoric. It has also never been so detached from the interests of its people.
A British Union flag on top of the Houses of Parliament in London on June 7, 2024. (Zula Rabikowska / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
When I first arrived in the UK in 2009, a bank clerk asked me what I thought about London and the UK more generally. I clearly recollect to have replied “chaotic,” which prompted the bank clerk to correct my pronunciation and to laugh it off with, “It can’t be as chaotic as Italy!”
Fast-forward fifteen years, and I am waiting for yet another overcrowded, delayed, and truly chaotic train — the epitome of how British services run these days. Ironically, trains in mainland Europe, in places notorious for their inefficiency and cost, are not as disorganized. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that Southern Europe has suddenly solved all its issues of under-funding and inefficiency. Rather, I am hinting at how the national myth of British superiority over other European countries in respect to societal efficiency is severely detached from reality.
The idea that Great Britain is well organized was part of the reason why I moved here. It was touted as a core element of the meritocratic machine that made the UK attractive to cheap, highly skilled labor from mainland Europe in the 2000s. This sentiment of superiority was also prevalent during COVID, when the public opinion in the UK was initially very critical of the management of the pandemic in the “lazy South.” At one point, celebrity doctor Christian Jessen even suggested that Italian people might be using the pandemic as an excuse to have a “long siesta.”
“The Will of the People”
The UK’s decline into chaos and disorganization over the past fifteen years is apparent even to upper- and middle-class commentators living in London, who are now signing up for private insurance to avoid the long wait times of the National Health Service (NHS). This disarray is clear across various public services, from the NHS to public water, from unsafe cladding to the energy crisis. The country simply does not serve the needs of the majority of its population.
This was certainly evident to an Eastern European post-doc who worked with me on a project. After navigating the hurdles of the British visa system, he left the country after a year, horrified by the state of trains, health care, and public services in general. Despite my efforts to convince him to stay, he found life significantly better in Prague.
How did we get here? Wasn’t this the country that was supposed to serve “the will of the people” after the Brexit vote in 2016? When I returned to the UK after spending a year in the United States, I found services even worse than I remembered, all covered with a reassuring and suffocating silence. The lack of outrage aligns with the stereotypical vision of Britishness — a culture that doesn’t complain, at least not out loud. This complacency is now clearly entrenched, fueling rising inequalities and a political system that gives the illusion that “the will of the people” is central to the mainstream political language.
Parochial Politics
At its most basic, populism can be understood to be a result of the tension arising from the belief that the people should be central to politics and the perception that currently they are not. Holding populist attitudes also means believing that there is an opposition between the people and the elites — those with economic, political, and media power.
In the wake of Brexit, mainstream parties in the UK have decisively moved toward populism. During Brexit, and particularly under Boris Johnson, the Tories adopted a clear right-wing populist script. Meanwhile, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn became a prime example of Chantal Mouffe’s concept of left-wing populism. To confuse things even further, over the course of the last few years, Kier Starmer has been flirting with national populism, while Nigel Farage’s new party (Reform UK) — shot through with a populist radical right rhetoric — is rising in the polls. As a result, populism has begun to overshadow the left/right divide in British politics. But while British politics has never been so saturated with populist rhetoric, it has also never been so detached from the interests of the people.
In H. G. Wells’s Country of the Blind, a mountaineer named Nunez stumbles upon a secluded valley in the Andes, where all the inhabitants have been blind for generations. Similarly, in post-Brexit Britain, the political classes are simply unable to compare the British state to what is happening elsewhere and imagine different ways of serving the public interests.
Wells asks the reader to “imagine a country encircled for centuries by an unbreachable wall. Which of its inhabitants would be in a position to describe such a confined nation? What could be the reference point; how could one measure what is perceived; moreover, what could be perceived?” In the wake of Brexit, Britain’s chattering classes are similarly politically blind.
For example, they cannot see and therefore cannot discuss how continental countries are using salary indexing to address inflation, thereby limiting the increase in the cost of living. As a result of this insularity, the horizon of the possible has been flattened. While the continental populists create cross-European coalitions in preparation for the upcoming European Parliament elections, political debate here remains irremediably constrained within suffocating national borders.
First Past the Post
Being a populist country that does not serve the people is also undoubtedly the product of having a First Past the Post (FPTP) majoritarian system. Unlike in other European countries, where parties fight to gain 10 percent of the vote to significantly influence coalition politics, the rise of antiestablishment movements in the UK is stifled by the lure of stability offered by the FPTP.
What hope remains for any progressive movement in the UK, especially amidst the ongoing purge of progressive candidates within Labour? Their only remaining chance seems to be gaining a few more seats for the Greens — a prospect that is highly unlikely to improve the health of public services.
These developments are underwhelming compared to the seismic changes elsewhere in Europe: new parties, dramatic realignment, political fragmentation, and the end of the Christian democratic and social democratic dominance of the past half century.
With individualization the default mode in a society marked by entrenched class privilege, and with meritocracy providing convenient legitimation for rising inequality, it is unsurprising that the deterioration of public services, trains, and health care hasn’t sparked the emergence of oppositional mass politics. Indeed, “the people” are not even mobilizing forms of chaotic public protest that could express political dissatisfaction, as one might expect to see in France.
It is preposterous to claim that the probable Labour government after the fourth of July is somehow an expression of “the will of the people.” To paraphrase Eugenio Montale, don’t ask the British people about what they want; in the torpor of the current status quo, they can only tell you what they don’t want. With a populist erosion of left/right political distinctions, the structural limitations of FPTP, and an increasingly insular and parochial tone in political debate, it’s difficult for regular Brits to even tell you that.