The road back to functionality will be difficult and unglamorous. What I said could apply to so many things—the climate crisis, covid, the academy…
But I'm thinking about Brexit and what would need to happen to undo its harm, and what is instead happening (and why). The harm Brexit has wreaked in just a few years is considerable. A clear majority of the British people, far exceeding the 52% of the Vote Leave win in 2016, now concludes Brexit is an utter failure.
For the UK to slowly pick itself out of this quagmire would require a range of policy shifts and investments that would be unglamorous, without an immediately visible payoff. It would not be easy, but it is what's needed to get the UK at least to some echo of its former glory.
But instead, the UK is wrapped in denialism. One clear way in which denialism finds its expression is scapegoating. Rishi Sunak tweeted today, on New Year's day, that the majority of foreign university students cannot bring family members to the UK, and that this is “delivering to the British people.”
Happy New Year, foreigners.
We know that immigrants, and international students in particular, bring many net benefits to the UK in terms of their expertise which they lend to the country, and immaterial benefits too in terms of long-term cordial relationships (e.g., between India and the UK) and the UK's soft power. International students in the 2021/22 cohort “made a £58m net economic contribution to the UK economy per constituency. This is equivalent to £560 per member of the resident population.”
Reducing the number of international students (which will surely happen if they cannot bring family) will be a tremendous act of self-harm. Who will make up for the losses at UK universities in income? British students, who will now be saddled with even more debt. This is not delivering to the British people.
Instead of the real patient and unglamorous work the UK would need to do to repair some of the damage of Brexit (I am not even talking about rejoining, which would be politically difficult though the UK public is now considerably more pro-EU than in 2016), we have policies that are unmoored from reality.
Why does this keep on happening? Annelien de Dijn, historian and political theorist at Utrecht University, calls this and similar policies and movements “paranoid nationalism."
I recommend her article on this in De Groene Amsterdammer (in Dutch, but hopefully Google translate will do a good job).
What she argues is that paranoid nationalism goes back to at least the mid-19th century, expressed in pogroms against Jews, and in the US in anti-Irish policies and political campaigns. It was temporarily on the back burner due to people's memory of fascism and World War II, but with World War II receding from living memory, there is nothing to prevent its rise.
A lot has been said about why paranoid nationalism is returning. De Dijn rejects explanations such as economic anxiety (see also
's recent piece on why the economic anxiety explanation for fascism is wrong), and the idea that the ordinary voter would feel ignored.No, De Dijn argues that it is the sheer ideology, including the racism and xenophobia of such policies, which attracts voters. As she says (I translate roughly)
Voters feel attracted to these [far-right] parties’ ideology. A vote for radical right is not a protest vote, but a vote in favor of a specific program: the protection of the nation, one's own people, against internal and external enemies [De Dijn, Groene Amsterdammer]
Like Rishi Sunak, I am the child to a parent from the global south who was able to make his life and provide opportunities for his children in the west. I have to conclude that Sunak, in helping to enact all these anti-immigrant policies, is doing so because he hopes this will strengthen his position and that of the Conservative Party.
So the sentiments he is appealing to are real. One reason I find it hard to accept the straightforward explanation (people vote for far-right parties and policies) is that it would push me to adopt a much less happy picture of fellow human beings than I would like. Wouldn't it be nicer if people really were at bottom accepting, recognizing the common humanity to all, and were merely misled by economic circumstance or empty rhetoric?
As De Dijn says, the solution is not as mainstream parties such as the Conservatives or Macron in France do to copy far-right talking points but to offer a real alternative.
That real alternative is that international collaboration is good and required to combat existential global challenges to the climate crisis. That secure relations with our neighbors is what is needed, that even island nation states are not political islands that can bask in isolationism. The sooner this is recognized, the sooner the difficult work can begin to undo some of the damage Brexit has wrought, and to reverse the astounding quick-paced decline that the UK now finds itself in.
Great piece, as always. I think you know it, but I wrote something about immigration and scapegoating a while back: https://alexanderdouglas.medium.com/immigration-and-scapegoating-c6450e48ebb5
I think you can cover a lot of ground of why paranoid nationalism is so popular in the UK (and the US) by tying it back to the national heritage of colonialism. Old canards like "the sun never sets on the British empire" expresss exactly the same kind of educational/cultural problem as described in de Dijn's article about anti-Semitism.
It's also worth reflecting how much of this sort of a dynamic is simple culthood. There's a famous discussion of Karl Rove regarding 'Reality Creators' and the obsession with projecting a strong national image to the rest of the world, as opposed to immigration weakening how (privileged) people look at their own nation:
"The [White House] aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/28/zen-and-the-art-of-american-foreign-policy/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email