4 days ago
The Brits who want to overthrow the state
Illustration by Roy Scott / Ikon Images
Reading this while British? Then there's an extremely high chance you want to overthrow the state, or so right-wing commentators would have it.
If this information comes as a shock, then I can but point you to this tweet by Daily Express political correspondent Christian Calgie that reads: 'If you don't understand how close tens of millions of Britons are to wanting a full-blown revolution, let alone fail to understand why, then you have no value as a political commentator.' There are almost 70 million people in the UK. That, by my count, puts the odds that you're a closet revolutionary at somewhere around one in three. Eye your neighbours with suspicion, comrade.
This is easy to mock. But this excitable doomsday prophesying is hardly unique. The Express journalist Carole Malone has warned Jeremy Vine that immigration has left Britain 'like a tinderbox that's set to explode'. Over in the Telegraph, Isabel Oakeshott has, more in sorrow than in anger, agreed with Nigel Farage's claim that Britain is facing 'societal collapse'. 'Unless our leaders get a grip – and fast,' she warned, 'exasperated communities will turn vigilante.' Meanwhile, columnist Allison Pearson – who, delightfully, co-hosts a podcast named Planet Normal – recently tweeted, 'Anyone else hoping for a military coup?' At its end, she included a shrug emoji.
Then there's disappointed former politics professor Matt Goodwin, whose Substack I have looked at so you don't have to. Recent headlines over there have included 'Labour is pushing the UK into civil unrest', 'Is Britain about to blow?', 'Epping is a warning of what's to come', and 'How things fall apart'. (This last one promises 'more BOMBSHELL numbers on what is really happening in the UK'. Exciting!)
I am writing this from London, which, so far as I can tell has not fallen, is not on fire and remains free of sharia law. So perhaps I know not whereof I speak. But I do not think this country is on the verge of revolution. Sorry, but I don't. It just isn't very British. We tried it once, didn't like it, switched it off again, and were then one of the few countries in Europe that didn't join in the fun during 1848. We've experienced both street action and political violence, yes, and these are febrile times – but such things have never overthrown a government. Most of the time they don't even change policy.
There is ample evidence of real rage out there (there's this report from Anoosh Chakelian, for one thing). Events in Epping are worrying; last summer there were riots. From Corbyn to Brexit, the Labour landslide to the Reform surge, there are plenty of signs that the public hungers for substantive change.
But anti-migrant protests have often been accompanied by pro-migrant counter-protests, and polling has found that the British public overwhelmingly oppose street violence as a form of political action. (According to YouGov, just 7 per cent supported last year's riots; 85 per cent were opposed.) This is not a country that's ready to man the barricades. Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
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All of which raises a question: what exactly do right-wing commentators think they're playing at? Why are they not just predicting social disorder – of the sort they'd want water cannons or worse to deal with, if it came from, say, students – but salivating over it? Their tone inescapably brings to mind the anti-hero character Rorschach from Alan Moore's Watchmen ('And all the whores and politicians will look up and shout: 'Save us!' And I'll look down and whisper: 'No.''). Or possibly it just reminds one of a tantruming child sobbing out the words, 'THEN you'll be sorry.'
One possible explanation for all this is that an urge to shout increasingly unhinged things is an unfortunate necessity in today's ultracompetitive attention economy. Another is that Brexit irreparably warped some commentators' grasp of the concept of loser's consent. If you've spent years earnestly arguing that the will of the people is paramount, and an election victory is a mandate to deliver whatever what you happen to want, then an election loss must come to feel insupportable. The will of the people, surely, must make itself known in some other way.
Then again, perhaps this is just what happens when a government is too cowardly to ever state, in plain language, that not all concerns are legitimate, that whipping up hysteria is, at best, anti-social, and that feeling angry is not the same thing as being right. It's just possible that all that's in the mix, too.
[See more: Visions of an English civil war]
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